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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 Mighael Botha, technology evangelist at Software AG. Software AG is a premiere sponsor of InfoWorld's upcoming SOA Executive Forum, and Mighael will be providing some of his insights on the state of SOA progress in 2007. Mighael will also be joining one of the panels at InfoWorld Executive Forum. Welcome, Mighael.

Mighael Botha: Hi, Joe.

JM: Can you describe how exactly governance keeps SOA initiatives on track, and why is governance so important?

MB: Well, I think governance is important because there are some rules that govern any organization as far as what's the financial data that they need to report to the SEC and all kinds of other things around that. I think within an IT organization, governance is important to make sure that the decision-making authority around the artifact are really controlled in a manner that management as well as the users of those artifacts have insight into what they can and cannot do.

One of the main drivers, I would think, around SOA governance is to make sure that the services that are being delivered are really quality services. At the end of the day, when we have all these distributor services and we get into a situation where we use an enterprise service bus and now start getting reuse of services as far as using fine-grained service to create coarse-grained services, the challenge I think without governance, would be if we want to change a specific service in our implementation. How would we go and do an impact analysis? To make sure that if we change the get employee service that none of the other operations and services within the organization would break.

So within governance, the main piece that is important is to keep our initiatives on track is to have a very clear defined implementation of policy management, service-level agreements and then also life cycle management. To make sure that if business, the business users request a service or if a data analyst requests a service, that there is a clear defined path within SOA and within the governance where we can actually go off and make sure that we control the life cycle of that service, from development through deployment and then basically, a year or two years from now, we would want to maybe replace the service with a new service, be able to do impact analysis to say okay, these are the services we need to change that I'm actually utilizing.

JM: Another term that is often discussed is the notion of right-sizing services and it seems to be especially a challenge for large companies. How do you make sure that the services that are being created and supported within various business units are the right fit and can scale with the requirements of the business?

MB: You work with your business users to define a business service that would really be used by business. When you go through and you develop, and go through your testing phase and might realize that a significant amount of data that is being returned by the service. Or that the underlying functionality of the service doesn't really fit the way that you have may have implemented it or as requested by IT, to be implemented might not fit within your organizations infrastructure.

And I see right-sizing as an iterative process where once you've got a service implemented, there is a constant measurement and making sure that you optimize the service. And eventually, I think--you know, it's like any other software product or software component out there. After a third or fourth iteration of the release of a service or a software package, you typically get into a situation where everything has been optimized and that piece of software is right-sized.

JM: Another emerging area or something that, a trend that's getting a lot of attention these days, is the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena. And one of the methodologies involves the use of mash-ups, front end applications that draw data from different sources and are brought together on some type of front end presentation. Do you see mash-ups playing a role in SOA and are they are governable?

MB: Yeah! I think mash-ups are really important for SOA. You know, typically when you talk to a business user about SOA, they don't really get the concepts about SOA because a lot of this happens in the background. If we start talking to a business user about an enterprise service bus and you need to have a governance tool to govern all of your services and all those kinds of things, business users find that very difficult to relate to those kinds of IT terms.

I see mash-ups as being the face of SOA. Something that I can take to a user, and say, "Okay, this is a mash-up that shows a single view of a customer within your organization." And the user might not understand what a mash-up is but when they view, let's say, the Web 2.0 or the Ajax front-end and they see that they can get all kinds of data, as far as biographical data, about their customer, or a product. And at the end of the day, they use just that front-end, and that front-end goes to five or six or seven different systems in the back end. That clearly puts a face to SOA. Especially if you think of our customers these days that would say, okay, I need to switch out maybe my legacy application that I have with a new purchased SAP application. Mash-ups would make that, in a sense, a little bit more fluent, that I can create a mash-up of both systems and present that to a user. The user would never know that Ajax is being extracted from the legacy system as well as the SAP system to be presented to them.

But the mash-up is the real face of SOA, bringing business closer to maybe a portal or event-driven architecture to show them that they can really get useful information from the new technology that is being implemented.

JM: Okay, great! Well, thank you, Mighael. Once again, this is Joe McKendrick for ebizQ, and I've been speaking with Mighael Botha, technology evangelist at Software AG and Mighael will be joining us at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum. I look forward to seeing you in New York, and thank you for your insights.

MB: Thanks, Joe!

Learn more at Software AG's Web Site