SOA Visionaries

Featured Speakers:

• Julianna Cammarano, Senior Project Marketing Manager for Progress Software, Actional product line
• David Linthicum

DL: Hi, this is Dave Linthicum, with ebizQ.net and this is the Service Oriented Architecture Visionary podcast and this is basically a series in talking to who's who in the world of service oriented architecture and web services management and people who are making an impact, not only with their products and technology but with their vision into the market and basically helping people grow their web services infrastructure and service oriented infrastructure going forward. My name is Dave Linthicum, I'm the CEO of the Linthicum Group LLC, a consulting organization dealing with the best of the best in service oriented architecture best practices, implementation and technology. And, I'm here today, with our guest Julianna Cammarano who is the Senior Project Marketing Manager for Progress Software, Actional product line.

Good morning, how ya doin', Julianna.

JC: Good morning, David. Great, how are you?

DL: Why don't you tell us a bit about yourself and then also tell us about how your product is basically extended beyond service oriented architecture and actually getting into web services management and how it's a more holistic approach than people who are simply approaching SOA.

JC: Sure. Well, again, my name is Julianna Camorano and I am working with the Actional product line and what's been very interesting is that when we talk about SOA, people frequently shy away from thinking that they need any kind of management because they say they're not actually using SOA. But the truth of the matter is that they are creating web services and frequently, again, they shy away from the management aspect of it. But, in fact, whenever you start creating web services, having management over those web services is critical. So, the key take away from that is the fact that whether you're creating web services, whether you have a fully developed SOA, a management needs to be a key component of your strategy.

DL: Absolutely, in fact in my client base, I find a lot of people that are getting into web services and they have thousands of web services within their organization that they're managing, either as web services they expose from an existing systems, thing they build from scratch or typically, services that exist outside the organization and management of those services is a critical component to their success. Would you agree with that?

JC: Oh, yes, definitely. As a matter of fact, I was just speaking with a customer of ours recently and they were talking about the critical nature of needing to have insight into external web services for a, let's say, different compliance, where they are looking at services from the Board of Health so being able to see the visible nature of those services through an end-to-end type of transaction flow is critical.

DL: Absolutely. Now, could you do me a favor and summarize the benefits of your technology and how it will help organizations and enterprises manage web services?

JC: Sure. We have an interesting approach that has made our product line extremely successful in that we've really got a centralized management architecture where we put points of visibility, points of control, points of enforcement, that really sit in the flow of activity of the web services or SOA. So, these aren't passive components, they're really active so they would run as either agents or proxies, dependent really on how you implement it and that's really what makes our architecture unique is that we push down all these policies into the points of visibility and control so they take responsibility for doing all the work. So, what does that translate into? What that really means is that the Actional server never becomes a bottle neck in the architecture and at the point that almost no additional running overhead to the application. So, there's no server or there's no application bottleneck and, thus, address the scalability of the management solution so that when the SOA is running, it's enforcing policy, notifying users of violations, inspecting message content, but it does this without you needing to modify the application, change the application behavior or writing any code at all. So, with that, we are really able to provide a benefit to the end user where there is no overhead within the entire infrastructure, there is no additional cost that is then needed to run this in production so we're giving you clear visibility end-to-end throughout, not just your web services, but we go above and beyond that so if you have http calls or if you are calling out to a database, again, it's an end-to-end transaction flow so we help users to visually see that and then pinpoint exactly where the problem exists.

DL: Wow, so I guess, if I'm going to summarize that, you guys are both non-invasive and scalable when it comes to managing web services.

JC: Exactly, David, you hit the nail on the head with that one.

DL: Wow, that's great, excellent point. Let me ask you a few questions here. And the first question is, “Shat trends have you seen option in the world of service oriented architecture, say in the last few years and what do you see going forward?"

JC: Well, it's been interesting in that originally when people were thinking about SOA management it's really, “OK, well I need to have this or I think about the need to have this when I start to deploy my web services” but really what we're starting to see is the mind set is shifting in that “I need to management and control of these services as I'm developing them” so it's important as you're developing them, as you're doing QA with them to make sure that the process flow is executing according to what the requirements are so that when, in fact, you go to deploy your web services, they are acting as expected and you don't have a critical fault within your whole flow. So, again, it' not just about deploying the web services, but it's really a full life cycle from when you're first setting up your requirements in your development phases and then all the way through.

DL: Wow. Yeah, that makes sense. So what are the common mistakes made when implementing web service management software that people can look out for?

JC: Well, what's interesting is people, and this is a normal trend that we see where, you know, it's usually, “let's look at the features” so it's a feature to feature comparison when folks are looking at a SOA management tool but what really comes into play and what people don't think about until after it's too late it's really what is the cost to deploy those features in your production environment and frequently, what people end up saying is that some of the solutions actually require 20-50% of each machine's CPU just to manage the machine which really means you need to price and expand your environment for 20-50% more capacity. Also, we see where people run into issues where they need to double their network bandwidth to really be able to utilize some of these features and also remember, this solution of SOA management, it is an active solution and so it's really part of the application flow so you've also got to watch out for if it's becomes, not only a server bottleneck, but an application bottleneck. And, again, people frequently don't see these problems until they go to deploy and then, because of the cost associated they end up not using the solution so then, again, your SOA management becomes shelf ware.

DL: Wow, that is very much to look out for. So, you guys have a fairly quick return on investment, would you say, when you implement your technology.

JC: Yes, I would and it's kind of funny and interesting when we go out and we do POCs, we'll be at an account and we'll be in their environment and folks that where we're working with the developer's will say, "Wow, you know, this web service may only have 2 or maybe 3 service consumers” and then we actually show them Actional running, they are amazed to see very quickly that, “oh my goodness, it's not 2 or 3 consumers, but, you know, 10, 20 or more." And the importance there is then that plays into effective capacity planning as well as what happens when, you know, you need to bring a machine down and how are consumers going to be affected by that, so very quickly, folks are able to see a benefit from the utilization of the product.

DL: OK, so how does your solution fit into the overall approach to service governance?

JC: Well, that's a great question because, you know, you hear about governance everywhere and, I think, a lot of people have different definitions of it but when you really talk about governance in respect to SOA and web services there's really design time governance as well as run time governance and where we fit into that picture is what I'm calling run time governance so it becomes critical that when you're applications are running, that you are able to look into the end-to-end transaction flow of what's happening in your environment so hence, the run time aspect of governance is where the Actional tools fit in.

DL: Well, awesome. So, how is your technology changing the service oriented architecture and web services management landscape going forward and what are some of the things we can look for from your technology as it starts to grow into the future.

JC: Well, I believe that folks are really starting to think of SOA management as a critical part of their strategy for SOA and web services so, what we've actually seen some of our customers doing moving forward is as they start to make the decision that they are going to embrace SOA and web services they're making the SOA management a critical piece of the success factor in the strategy to their initial designs of web services. So, it's no longer an afterthought, it becomes part of the strategy moving into the development of this technology.

DL: Now, let me tell you, in my experience, my client base, there's an awful lot of web services out there that are being built, either exposed, built new or actually consumed from outside the organization and the management of those services is critical to making their systems run correctly and I think that governance and run time governance is a critical way, to make that work, and I think that your technology seems to be moving in the right directions here so I urge people to take a look at it.

Well, I just want to thank you very much for being with ebizQ.net for the SOA Visionary podcast, you're definitely a SOA visionary and we got a chance to take a look at the technology that I think can make people's lives a whole lot easier if they're going to stand up, manage, and govern web services going forward. So, any parting words for our listeners in terms of, you know, what they should think about in this space and what you would tell them to look at as a visionary in this area?

JC: Yeah, what I would tell them to look at it is think strategically and think for your return on investment where the performance of your entire infrastructure is critical to the needs of the business, hence needing to include a SOA management element as part of your strategy from the ground up.

DL: Absolutley, you can't disagree with that. Certainly, return on investment has been a major focus in my practice and thinking strategically is also very important, as well. You've got to remember that you have to take this stuff to its logical conclusion to get the strategic advantage for this technology as you start driving it into the organizations and into the enterprise. Well, I just want to thank our guest Julianna Cammarano, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Progress software, Actional product line for coming on the ebizQ Service Oriented Architecture Visionary podcast show. Again, my name is Dave Linthicum and I urge you folks to go out to Progress Software and Actional and take a look at their technology and feel free to come back to me with questions and I will pass them on to Julianna. So, thank you very much and you guys have a great day.