Print this article Email this article Talk Back! Write to Editor

Full Transcript: BEA's Charles Stack Talks to ebizQ's Joe McKendrick

05/30/2007

Full Transcript: BEA ebizQ-InfoWorld Podcast with Joe McKendrick and Charles Stack


Listen to the entire 12:00 podcast Download file


Joe McKendrick: Hello! This is Joe McKendrick, contributor to ebizQ's "SOA in Action" site. Thank you for joining us for this podcast on the important issues, as well as tremendous opportunities enterprises face around service-oriented architectures today. It's my pleasure to introduce Charles Stack, vice president of engineering with BEA Systems. BEA is the cornerstone sponsor of InfoWorld's upcoming SOA Executive Forum, and Charles will be providing some of his insights on the state of SOA progress in 2007. Charles will also be leading a session at InfoWorld Executive Forum.

Now on to our discussion on the state of SOA. Let's talk about the current SOA realities on the ground at enterprises. Charles, how far along are companies with their SOA initiatives? Are you seeing full functioning implementations now or are people still on a learning curve?

"Companies are starting to recognize that the changes that come about from implementing SOA may be more fundamental that they had originally thought."
      --Charles Stack, BEA

Charles Stack: Well, BEA's got thousands of customers and they certainly run the gamut from very early adopters who are fairly far along today in their SOA deployments to companies who are still just considering how SOA fits in their future plans. So we've got a very wide range of adoption across the entire spectrum. But, given that, I think there's some interesting observations we can make, particularly from those companies that are pretty far along and I think it's a little surprising maybe, and I think it may be worth a comment that some--companies are starting to recognize that the changes that come about from implementing SOA may be more fundamental that they had originally thought. I think that's an interesting unanticipated event, I think.

Organizational changes that are required as a result of SOA, and business opportunities that are presented because they deconstructed their business capabilities to sets of services. Those two things maybe are taking some people by surprise.

JM: Hmph! Interesting. What do you see as the connection between reuse, which is one of the fundamental values of SOA, and SOA governance? Everyone's talking about the importance of governance within growing SOA environments. Can you describe how governance keeps these initiatives on track and why it's so important?

CS: Governance is basically taking, you know, standards and practices that you want to enforce across your service-orientation architecture deployments and making them effective. Making the standards visible to those people who care and then making sure that there's compliance with those standards and practices. And as reuse factors into the equation, frankly most companies are doing SOA to get cost savings and reuse is at core at those cost savings. So the more you can guarantee or ensure that reuse occurs, the greater your return on investment is going to be. So there's a lot of organization there.

But what governance brings to the reuse equation for many, many customers is the ability to prescribe services to projects. So, reuse in one environment is just, "here's a bunch of services, use them if you want to." When you add governance into the equation, you now have a situation where at the project initiation level, at the architecture and review level, you can prescribe specific services that ought to be used by project teams, and that ensure or enforce those services are actually consumed.

And what you see is your reuse and therefore, your return investment goes up significantly with governance because your able to prescribe them. And the other piece, kind of a flip side of reuse, is eliminating redundancy. So with proper governance strictures in place, you can make sure that two projects don't build duplicative services. And so it's kind of the prescribed reuse, so that you get cost savings and ensure that there's no further duplication of functionality through governance. So they are both very important.

JM: How about if an organization is at the early stages of its SOA deployment? If it only has a few number, a smaller number of services, do they still need governance?

CS: Well, you know. I don't know if you have kids or not, but if you have kids, having some set of rules is important even early on. You know, you may add to the rules as they get older but having the concept of, you know--don't eat on the floor, is something we need to start with early. I think it's much the same with governance. You need to put the gates in place. Now it may just have very modest number of standards or practices that are enforced. But the gates to ensure that services comply with basic standards, basic interoperability requirements need to be in place, even early on as you're only doing the first couple of services. Because you want to establish that the precedent. And then as your SOA initiative matures and builds and grows, you can, as necessary add to the requirements for moving from one step in the development lifecycle to another. You can add to the requirements and increase the complexity of the gates, but I think you need to put the gates in place early.

JM: Okay. And you discussed a little bit earlier about some of these surprises companies are seeing as they roll out their SOA. Are there any other big surprises that companies are observing as they move from the piloting or the early stages into fully functioning SOA?

CS: There is one, that we're hearing increasingly from companies that kind of have significant numbers of services deployed and available in a repository. So once you take the services that you have in your enterprise and you post them in a repository, and make them available to a broader community--whether it's internal to your enterprise or even external to partners. One of the things that we see happening is unintended uses or serendipity, if you will. And services are being consumed by others within the organization in ways and for reasons that were maybe never considered.

And I think that's both the delight and the curse of an effective service-oriented architecture. Because you've deconstructed your business functionality into easily consumable parts, but knowing full well, you may not know who is going to consume them or why. But the business loves it because they've got all these new opportunities that they can then exploit. But it's those unintended usages that I think are taking so many people by surprise. Where businesses are finding that what they intended the services to be used for only scratch the surface of what they actually could be used for.

I think that's gonna be very exciting to see because it makes our businesses more agile. It puts more stress on IT. But it does make the businesses more agile, which is what we're after in the first place.

JM: Hmm. Okay. Okay, great! And, another emerging trend we're hearing a lot about these days is Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. And BEA has made some announcements recently in this area. One aspect of Web 2.0 in particular that’s interesting is the whole mash-up scenario. Users can create mash-up front end applications that can draw data from across the web. Do you see mash-ups playing a role in SOA as well.

CS: Well, I think we probably have to change the name in order to get them to fly in the enterprise. But conceptually, you know, both SOA and Web 2.0 are largely about deconstruction. Where you take kind of monolithic functionality and deconstruct it into its constituent parts. And then enable people to reassemble that into new functionality. So if you look at Web 2.0 things like Amazon's S3 storage system or their elastic computing cloud or collab-nets, collaborative functionality is available as a service, or some of the other things that are out there. eBay is making their functionality available as services and so forth.

You take that and start seeing companies building those deconstructed pieces of functionality into entirely new businesses. I think that's a perfect parallel to what can happen inside an enterprise when you deliver a series of services, post them in a repository and let people within your enterprise see what's there, they're gonna come up with new creative ways of delivering business value. Now, like I said, we probably aren't going to call them mash-ups. But that's really the end game for an effective SOA, a service-oriented architecture that delivers the ability to decompose initially and then recompose business capabilities in new and more productive ways.

So the parallels between those two are very striking. And I'm not at all surprised that, you know, people have made that connection. And BEA's announcement, in coming up with three new products, pages for drag-and-drop creation and Ensemble for management, you know, enterprise-level management too is a mash-up concept? And then the third product is Pathways which is, I don't know, probably best described as a way to get the wisdom of crowds but in a heterogeneous fashion.

So, it's--you know--trying to bring a little more management, structure, and fancier words, if you will, to the mash-up concept in the enterprise.

JM: Great! It's going to be interesting to watch this convergence taking place.

CS: Yeah, I think it's gonna be really interesting to see businesses that take stuff they've built internally as services, combine those with external things, you know, delivered by some of the third party Web 2.0 companies and create new business value out of that. That's gonna be really interesting to see the merging of the two spaces.

JM: We're gonna see more applications that we could not have dreamed about earlier, as SOA, and mash-ups, and Web 2.0 evolve.

CS: Yeah, I think you're gonna see real acceleration and some interesting new value propositions both internal and new businesses that come out of this mix.

JM: Great, great! And, Charles, can you give us a sneak preview as to your session that you'll be providing?

CS: Yeah! I'm going to talk about visualizing the future of SOA. I think we have a lot of pieces in place now to effectively deliver service-oriented architecture and being able to visualize what that will look like in 18 or 24 months is an important effort to try to get us there. So we don't go astray and we actually do deliver on the immense promise of SOA. So I'm going to try to cast forward a year and a half or two years and see what it might look like to have both internal and external services at your beck and call to build the business value.

JM: Wow! That ought to be interesting.

CS: Well, we'll see how I do! (laughs) Sounds good right now. Gotta deliver on that promise to, just like SOA.

JM: Great! Well, thank you very much, Charles. It was a pleasure speaking with you and once again, this is Joe McKendrick for ebizQ and I've been speaking with Charles Stack, vice president of engineering for BEA Systems, who will be joining us at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum. Thank you, Charles.

CS: Thanks, Joe!


Learn more at BEA Systems' Web Site

  • Subscribe
  • Contribute
Subscribe to our Newsletters:

 ebizQ Insider

 Subscribe Blog Updates via RSS

 Subscribe News via RSS

ebizQ is very interested in what you have to say. To contribute an article, an opinion, or to become a blogger, please contact Peter Schooff.

  • ebizQ Videos

You need Adobe Flash Player 9 to view this widget.

Get Adobe Flash player

More Videos »

  • Virtual Conferences
  • Webinars
  • Roundtables

SOA Cloud Qcamp

June 3, 2009

One of the most compelling trends in the enterprise business technology space over the past year has been the emergence of cloud computing. In ebizQ’s upcoming Qcamp virtual un-conference, leading industry experts and practitioners will explore the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) in supporting cloud-computing initiatives. Additionally, the new skills that developers and IT managers need for successful cloud development will be discussed.Register

View All Virtual Conferences

Insurance: Explore how SOA & BPM are driving down expenses and improving ROI

Date:Aug 26, 2009
Time:12:00 PM ET- (16:00 GMT)

REGISTER TODAY!

ROUNDTABLE: Open Source Market Update

Date:Sep 30, 2009
Time:12:00 PM ET- (16:00 GMT)

REGISTER TODAY!
View All Roundtables
  • White Papers
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs

Joe McKendrick: Part II of II: Designing Evolve-ability into SOA and IT Systems

In part two of Joe McKendrick's recent podcast with Miko Matsumura, chief strategist for Software AG, they talk about how SOA and IT systems need to change and grow and adapt with the organization around it.

Listen Now

Phil Wainewright: Helping Brands Engage with Social Media

Phil Wainewright interviews David Vap, VP of products at RightNow Technologies, and finds out how sharing best practices can help businesses understand how best to engage with online communities.

Listen Now

Peter Schooff: Making Every IT Dollar Result in a Desired Business Outcome: Scott Hebner of IBM Rati

Scott Hebner, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for IBM Rational, discusses a topic on the top of every company's mind today: getting the most from IT investments.

Listen Now

Jessica Ann Mola: Where Will BI Fit In? Lyndsay Wise Explains

In BI, this tough economy and the increasing role of Web 2.0 and MDM are certainly topics on people's minds today. WiseAnalytics' Lyndsay Wise addresses each of them in this informative podcast.

Listen Now

Dennis Byron: Talking with...Deepak Singh of BPM Provider Adeptia

Deepak Singh, President and CTO of Adeptia, joins ebizQ's Dennis Byron in a podcast that gets its hand around the trend of industry-specific BPM.

Listen Now
More Podcasts
  • Most Read
  • Quick Guide
  • Most Discussed

BPM VIEWPOINT: How Do You Look at BPM?

From Dennis Byron: For BPM to fit at the top of the stack, it can't merely support workflow or integration. It needs to integrate the BI aspects of the stack, too. Learn More

How ACORD Can Be Used As A Best Practice For Data Integration

In the insurance industry, companies have accepted that systems, strategies and data all developed in silos are making it difficult for them to grow and adjust to today’s market demands. The obstacles imposed by siloed approaches are painfully obvious to companies as they try to gain a better understanding of their customers and meet the growing constraints imposed by compliance and regulatory requirements. Leveraging industry standards with full data integration is one was to tackle this challenge. Learn More

When It Comes to BPM Type, It All Depends on You

From Dennis Byron: Is it better to choose one strain of BPM over another? The answer is unique to your organization. Learn More

Maximizing Your Business Rules Investment

Can decision management really deliver costs savings, agility and happy customers on a consistent basis? Learn More

BPM VIEWPOINT: Does Case Management Fill in the Gaps in the BPM Spectrum?

From Dennis Byron: BPM products optimized for case management might be the products that bridge the extremes in my view of the BPM spectrum. Learn More

Building The Instantly Responsive Enterprise

Integrating BPM and CEP gives you intelligent business processes that can react to rapidly changing business conditions with continuous visibility. Learn More

Enterprise Linkage: New Change Management

Insurers need to think about creating "true linkage," which means linking business strategy to process to IT investments and thereby setting the foundation for true change. Learn More

The Invisible Hand of BI

To be effective, business intelligence technology must work behind the scenes to deliver relevant information when, where, and how it's needed. Learn More

Quick Guide: What is Enterprise 2.0?

A lot of people are talking about Enterprise 2.0 as being the business application of Web 2.0 technology. However, there's still some debate on exactly what this technology entails, how it applies to today's business models, and which components bring true value. Some use the term Enterprise 2.0 exclusively to describe the use of social networking technologies in the enterprise, while others use it to describe a web economy platform, or the technological framework behind such a platform. Still others say that Enterprise 2.0 is all of these things. Learn More

Quick Guide: What is BPM?

Learn More

Quick Guide: What is Event Processing?

Smart event processing can help your company run smarter and faster. This comprehensive guide helps you research the basics of complex event processing (CEP) and learn how to get started on the right foot with your CEP project using EDA, RFID, SOA, SCADA and other relevant technologies. Learn More

ebizQ Forum - Are Organizations Developing BPM Solutions From a Top-Down or Bottom-Up Approach and Which is Best?

To Michael: To select what has to be improved (e.g. automated), a...

Service-Oriented Solutions - To Whom Model-Driven Approach is Dangerous?

Hi Johan,

thank you for such prompt response.

I...

The Connected Web - Pod-Scale vs Warehouse-Scale Computing

Phil,

It appears that Google is looking at the world...

Leveraging Information and Intelligence - When Business Intelligence Saves Lives

I believe work has been done in this area privately for some time....

BPM in Action - Join the Debate: Business Process Management or Business Process Automation

I wonder if BPM has become more popular because many solutions...

Kiran Garimella's BPM Blog - IBM / FileNet

We are looking for a FileNET admin/developer in Houston, TX. The...

Business-Driven Architect - @ Enterprise 2.0 Cloud Roadmaps Panel

As we see more companies consider the cloud we should be...

BPM from a Business Point of View - Expectations from BPM...

Scott,
I agree that process management is good way for...