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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 architecture today. It's my pleasure to introduce Eric Newcomer, Chief Technology Officer at Iona. Iona is a sponsor of Info World's upcoming SOA Executive Forum and Eric will be providing some of his insights on the state of SOA progress in 2007. Eric will also be joining a panel on Building an SOA that Scales at the InfoWorld Executive Forum.

Eric, first, I'd like to talk about the current SOA realities on the ground at enterprises. How far along are companies with their SOA initiatives? Are you seeing full functioning implementations now or are people still on a learning curve?

Eric Newcomer: Well, Joe, we have a real range. You know, we often talk about one of our pioneering SOA customers, Credit Suisse, we've been working on an SOA for about ten year primarily based on CORBA, and last I heard they had about 2000 services in production and processing about a billion transactions a year. And yet, some other divisions of that same institution are just sort of getting started with their SOA projects. So we see a wide range, even in one company. Some companies are really going for it, making a strategic investment. Other companies are just trying to learn what it's all about and figure out what to do.

JM: Okay. And, of course, everyone is now talking about the importance of governance within growing SOA environments. Can you describe how exactly governance keeps SOA initiatives on track? Why is it so important, even from the early stages?

EN: Well, sure. It's all about the approach. Often, you'll hear this said that SOA is not about technology because you can use multiple different various technologies to implement an SOA. Today, we're focused on using Web services for it, which is the best fit for our technological approach today. But there are other options people can use and they do. So the starting point really has to be the approach, the thinking, the design, the culture, the skill set--how are they going to approach the problem? And when you talk about Credit Suisse, it's a great example because they have a very complete set of governance policies and procedures inside the company with a kind of an architectural oversight function that keeps those things in line, and keeps the projects going in the direction that they need to go to become successful SOA projects.

And we are talking with Credit Suisse among others about our new registry or repository product to try to help meet those requirements that some of those customers have. Because once they get started thinking about their IT, and thinking is again the important thing, as a collection of reusable services, they are going to need some help managing, maintaining, updating, renewing and, you know, changing the policy settings and configuration settings on those services, and that's where the governance tools can really help.

JM: Okay. And a term that's entered our lexicon is the notion of rightsizing services. The foundation of SOA, of course, is supporting these services that are developed and deployed. How do you make sure that the services that are being generated by various business units are the right fit and can scale with the requirements of your business?

EN: I think eventually the answer comes down to the capability of achieving the business goals through the large-grained interfaces that map the services the business provides, if you will, because businesses provide services to their customers and conceptually, what they want in the software, in the SOA, is a service that helps them deliver their services, their products to their end customers and that's the right level of granularity conceptually. But then, of course, it has to be put into technology and we see emerging technology such as SCA, which provides the capability to compose multiple services together and orchestration engine such as BPEL where you can take the very large-grained interface that meets the needs of the business and decompose it or assemble the smaller grain services that the developers might be working on.

JM: Okay, great! And I'm gonna talk about another emerging trend that we're hearing a lot about these days and it does involve SOA to a degree--and that's the whole Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena.

EN: I heard somebody discussing this topic the other day say that the users are really getting spoiled by things like Google maps that they can find on the Internet and the Internet sites that provide a very high level of interactivity and they're starting to request that level of functionality into their enterprise apps as well. And so you've got a couple of challenges there. One of them is to get the level of interactivity improved in the user interfaces on your enterprise applications based on, you know, adoption of some newer technologies such as AJAX and maybe Flash, and so on, and some of these nice presentation technologies that are coming out.

But you still have the issue of how to best connect those things up to the existing systems or your enterprise data sources. Sometimes, one thing I would caution against is thinking about a mash-up as a way to integrate applications. We've seen this with portals and with screen scraping. You may be tempted by the mash-ups to think about them as the way to combine the data from different sources, but you might want to make sure that you have a good design for scalability performance and to maintainability, which sometimes taking that approach might get in the way of.

JM: Okay. And moving on, for our final question, on to another Web 2.0-related activity. And that's software-as-a-service, or SaaS, which also employs or is interconnected with some extent with SOA-based services but coming out of third-party firms. How, can SaaS be used to break the application and data bottlenecks, with the Enterprise? And is there a connection with SOA efforts underway?

EN: Well, I'll tell you where I see the biggest potential for software as service in SOA is going to become a case where companies start to create their applications more and more using a set of reusable services or taking the functionality of the application more and more from their library of reusable services, if you will, and start to think about some of those reusable services as being hosted outside of the company and being delivered in a kind of software as a service mode. And these would probably be for the types of commodity services that companies would previously have looked at, getting from an ERP system or some kind of package application that they would buy in-house.

So I see software as a service taking a very important role in SOA, especially around the kinds of commodity or very general purpose functions, accounting and billing, maybe security, maybe transformation, where it's not really to a company's competitive advantage to develop, build and host those kinds of services.

JM: Okay, great! Thank you, Eric.

EN: Thanks, Joe!

JM: And, once again, this is Joe McKendrick for ebizQ and I've been speaking with Eric Newcomer, Chief Technology Officer at Iona, who will also be joining us at Info World's SOA Executive Forum.

Learn more at IONA's Web Site