During our "off air" preamble with Miko Matsumura prior to recording our podcast earlier this week, he mentioned that he likes MWD's focus on "Big SOA".

I'd never thought of what we tell customers about SOA in this way before, but it's true that we try and get people thinking about how SOA can help them transform their organisations in the long term by pushing the boundaries of SOA and not sticking with an overly-technical, bottom-up approach that sees SOA as "EAI with standards". So Miko got me thinking about what, precisely, "Big SOA" might be and how it might be different from something that for the sake of argument we might call "little SOA".

So I came up with a picture:

As the picture shows, I think the difference between "little" and "big" SOA comes down to how you look at the "S" and the "A" of SOA.

In "little SOA" (bottom left of the picture), organisations have a software development centric view of what a "service" is. A service is basically a standalone software component with some kind of remotely addressable invocation interface (let's say a WS-* interface for now). In "little SOA" organisations have a similarly narrow view of what "architecture" is - architecture is basically software design with a corner office.

In "big SOA" (top right of the picture), organisations have a much broader view of what a "service" is. In this broader view a service isn't something you build; it's something that is experienced by a consumer. This view, therefore, is really about realising that delivering a service requires all sorts of IT competencies (design, development, integration, testing, deployment, admin, ops and change management) to be integrated together across the lifecycle of an investment that is packaged up as a service. That's a very different perspective on "service" that is not coincidentally much closer to what a business exec would think of if you asked them what a "service" is. In big SOA organisations also have a broader view of what architecture is about. Architecture isn't an inwardly-focused IT competence that seeks to make global optimisations to portfolios of software development projects. It's an outwardly-focused business-IT communication competence that seeks to further understanding of IT within business, and of business within IT.

I don't have hard quantitative data to back this up, but based on anecdotal evidence of customer conversations my feeling is that the majority of companies considering or starting out with SOA are doing "little SOA".

What do you think?

Posted by neilwarddutton in Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apologies for the poor pun, it's the evening before the Easter break (public holidays on Friday and Monday here in the UK) and I'm feeling festive.

So, it's finally happened. For those of us with the dubious title of "industry watcher" it's not a particular surprise to see webMethods acquired. We'd heard rumours for some time that the company might be readying itself financially and organisationally for a sale. Clearly the 25% price premium that Software AG (SWAG) plans to pay in purchasing the company at $9.15 a share represents a good deal for its shareholders, as webMethods' stock had got stuck around $7 for quite some months.

But what is a surprise (to me at least) is the buyer.

For one thing, we're used to big industry whales swallowing small specialist minnows: this is one medium-sized software company buying another medium-sized software company. SWAG's 2006 full-year revenue totalled in the region of $500m. webMethods has a different financial year to SWAG, but its revenue in the equivalent period totalled roughly $200m.

There's one particular feature of the two companies' income statements which is shared: both companies make more money from software maintenance than they do from selling new product licenses. Both companies are living more off their past success than their current success (although the balance seems as if it could be tipping the right way in SWAG's case).

Software AG is a company with a long history as a middleware company, but it's not a glorious one. It scored huge success in the 1970s with the ADABAS DBMS and 1980s with the Natural language and development environment, but none of its more recent infrastructure product developments - EntireX (object and message broker), Tamino (XML database/integration platform) and Bolero (Java app server) have penetrated far beyond its established loyal customer base. What's interesting, though, is that with new SWAG products Centrasite (SOA registry/repository) and Crossvision (BPM, ESB, legacy integration, composite application development) now on the market, the webMethods acquisition certainly doesn't look like one to be based around technology. There's a hell of a lot of technology overlap.

So this acquisition appears to be more about acquisition of customers and "mindshare" in complementary regions. Despite a US subsidiary with a long history (which started off independently, was bought by its parent in 1988, then spun off through a venture buy-out in 1997, and re-purchased in 2001), SWAG's visibility in North America is not high (any of our US readers heard of EntireX, Tamino or Bolero?). Despite webMethods' reorganisations which have cut back the size of its European operations over the past years, it seems to retain very high recognition in North America.

What will I be watching? I'll be watching to see what happens to products and people as the two companies come together. Given the huge portfolio overlap, from a product and technology - and ultimately a customer - standpoint, this will be a difficult integration to pull off.

Posted by neilwarddutton in Architecture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I spent the beginning of last week in San Diego at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), the company's annual conference focused on all things systems management. With time to kill on the 15-hour return journey, I began to draft my thoughts only for this post from Coté over at RedMonk to pop into my feed reader. As well as providing excellent summaries of IT management, Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and the company's System Center product family, Coté provides his impressions of MMS and Microsoft's approach to systems management. Since my impressions were much the same:

- Significant focus on delivery with System Center Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Essentials, Virtual Machine Manager and Service Manager (although the latter is still a year away)
- Emphasis on modeling - Service Modeling Language, Common Modeling Language (adding the management semantics to SML), CMDB, Management Packs
- Raising the ITIL flag - Microsoft Operations Framework (which Microsoft has until recently failed to exploit despite a long-standing ITIL foundation); System Center Service Manager and CMDB
- Plugging some notable gaps - OEM relationship with EMC for network-aware management but support for a heterogeneous environment requires more work.

I won't repeat them in detail here.

Instead, I thought I would call out something which I felt was largely absent from the two days of briefings and meetings with the Windows Enterprise Management Division team: how they help organisations align what they do from a systems management perspective with business objectives and priorities. Ultimately, as Microsoft claims, that's what DSI is really all about:

A dynamic system is Microsoft's vision for what an agile business looks like—where IT works closely with business in order to meet the demands of a rapidly changing and adaptable environment. The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is Microsoft's technology strategy for products and solutions that help businesses enhance the dynamic capability of its people, process, and IT infrastructure using technology

Microsoft has done a pretty good job with its Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Model of outlining a roadmap to dynamic systems nirvana, as well as assessment tools to help organisations understand where they are on that path. The company has also gathered a significant amount of data from its customers which should help IT organisations to justify IO investment to the business.

However, the company hasn't really explained how it can help them to maintain the dialogue with the business once the investment has been secured - understanding and capturing business expectations; providing business-meaningful monitoring and metrics; correlating IT security management (as an aside, Microsoft needs to tighten the linkage between its System Center and security - Forefront, Identity Lifecyle Manager - offerings) with business risk management etc. Microsoft needs to address this, not least because all of its enterprise systems management competitors are claiming such capabilities, be it Business Service Management from BMC, Business Service Optimization from CA, Business Technology Optimization from HP, Service Management from IBM.

There were signs, admittedly subtle ones that were obscured by the focus on new System Center products, in Bob Muglia's Tuesday morning keynote that Microsoft recognises this need:

- Plans to extend Design For Operations to a 'business analyst' audience
- The use of SML (presumably in BizTalk) for business process and key performance indicator modeling
- 2007 Office System (Project Server for portfolio management?) as a component of Microsoft's management offerings
- DSI is "ERP for IT"

Fortunately the timings of my meetings meant that I had a chance to quiz Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Windows Enterprise Management Division, about these small but important aspects of the keynote. He confirmed my interpretations of Muglia's comments in light of aligning IT operations with the business. He wasn't able to go into too much detail but I fully expect to see Microsoft begin to talk about these aspects of its management strategy in the not too distant future.

With Microsoft now four years into its ten-year management initiative it's good to see it delivering the first generation of DSI-era management tools. It's equally encouraging to see that the company recognises that it's not just an IT proposition. The company certainly has many of the assets required to help IT engage with a business audience but Microsoft is already coming from behind when it comes to IT management. There may be another six years of DSI but that's a LONG time in the IT industry, so it has to act quickly if its not to be forever trying to catch up with its competitors.

Posted by nmacehiter in IT Service Management | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)