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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 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?

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!

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