July 3rd, 2009
Oracle's FusionFest: BEA underneath, dogfood, Sun on the horizon
In a large splash out of Washington DC this week, Oracle rolled out the next iteration of its Fusion Middleware suite, dubbed 11g. The announcement — let’s call it “FusionFest” — was complex and densely packed, and product details have received plenty of coverage elsewhere across the Web, so we won’t go into it here. (Oracle presentation here, ZDNet also has cache of Oracle Fusion Middleware content, whitepapers and posts.)
BEA headlines FusionFest ‘09
It’s important to note that Oracle has declared “mission accomplished” in terms of bringing in all the prime pieces of last year’s BEA acquisition. In fact, the BEA’s crown jewel, the WebLogic server, has been integrated into Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g and beefed up with “new levels of operational insight and automation,” as well as Oracle Grid capabilities. “In 11g, there’s a lot of integration with the BEA products,” Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware products, said at a press conference leading up to the launch. “WebLogic server is the strategic application server which is the basis of the 11g product family.”
My pal Tony Baer weighed in on FusionFest, stating that while the new product details were pretty “anticlimatic,” it was noteworthy that this was more about BEA than Oracle pre-BEA. “Oracle had Fusion middleware prior to acquiring BEA, but there’s little question that BEA was the main event. WebLogic filled the donut hole in the middle of the Fusion stack with a server that was far more popular than Oracle Containers for Java EE (OC4J),” he writes. “Singlehandedly, BEA catapulted Oracle Fusion into becoming a major player in middleware.”
Of course, the impending Sun Microsystems acquisition is another massive pile-o’-stuff coming down the pike — and perhaps the theme for FusionFest ‘10. Or, as Miko Matsumura likes to call this next emerging combine, “Snorkel.” Miko cautions against relying on a single stack from one vendor for all middleware needs.
Between BEA, and soon, Sun, there’s a ton of middleware from a lot of different place for a lot of different uses coming under a single domain. As ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner put it: “Oracle is well on its way to obviating the middleware moniker. Perhaps we should call it ‘anyware.’” Dana was on a roll, suggesting that Oracle really needs to hop on the cloudtrain to really start making this monstrosity work. “The 11g continental conglomeration must be the gateway for the enveloping 12c, as in “c” for cloud. You don’t need to be an oracle to factor that clear and necessary path to the future,” he says.
Dana also feels these acquisitions and integrated suites are giving Oracle the edge. “Of the still-standing middleware field — IBM, Microsoft, Software AG, Red Hat/JBoss, Progress, TIBCO, SAP and Sybase — only a few will be both able to get the ‘anyware’ in terms of product breadth and of cloud delivery.”
Another interesting point by Oracle’s Rizvi is that his company is eating its own dogfood. All new Oracle products going forward (and I presume that includes the database and E-Business Suite) will be constructed from the Fusion Middleware suite itself. As he put it: “11g middleware is the platform on which we are developing the next generation of Oracle applications. So the next generation of the applications that we are developing is also leveraging the same principles that our customers will be leveraging. We have been working with our applications division for over a year in terms of early use of 11g.”
ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan also provides coverage of FusionFest, noting the immensity of what is a complex and often mis-understood strategy on the part of Oracle: “To say there are a few moving parts in Oracle’s Fusion day is a bit of an understatement,” he mused.
ZDNet colleague and Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett says that he’s “still betting that in the long term, Oracle’s strategy will be shown as fundamentally flawed.” That’s because Oracle has been on a massive acqusition binge — 58 over the last six years. “It’s a pantomime horse of many moving parts the company is trying to pull together and which may one day see its nadir in Fusion Applications.” He adds that the mega-suite approach doesn’t have a great history. Oracle is demonstrating that it has a “vise-like grip on everything from hardware through middleware and on to applications,” he said. “No vendor on the planet has successfully pulled off the ‘end-to-end one-stop shop’ trick and Oracle most certainly won’t do it.”
We’ll have to see if Oracle pulls it off, and perhaps provide more details at FusionFest ‘10. Will Sun be the headline there? Probably not enough time, but it only took 12 months to fuse BEA into the Oracle machine.
July 1st, 2009
Do we need cloud oriented architecture?
One of the criticisms leveled at service oriented architecture is that the ‘architecture’ aspect has often been overlooked. In one of his latest analyses, ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer wonders where architecture fits among all the excitement around cloud computing.
“The discussion of architecture has been given short shrift in cloud computing conversations. In much the same way that the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) conversation degenerated into a conversation about the (often unnecessary) Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), the cloud conversation is degenerating into one about the infrastructure needed to handle scalable service provider volume.”
Cloud providers have been more concerned with infrastructural concerns than business requirements, Ron said. “When the ‘architecture team’ meets in these cloud providers, what problems are they aiming to solve? Business problems?” he asks. “Certainly not. … Where’s the business in all this? The answer: nowhere.”
As a result, Ron also pointed out that moving to the cloud will not take away the need for solid enterprise architecture go away — it will make EA even more important.
June 30th, 2009
Gartner: companies gear up SOA for upcoming economic recovery
In a recent interview, Gartner’s Paolo Malinverno, reflecting on the consultancy’s recent Application Development and Integration Summit, said interest in SOA is riding high, despite the recent economic slump. He also added that many companies are aligning their SOA strategies to be ready to go with new systems and business initiatives as the economy regains steam.
He added the “The rest aren’t under so much cost pressure, but are still preparing [their SOA strategies] now so they can be first out of the blocks when the [economic] downturn ends.”
June 29th, 2009
Are we too impatient with SOA?
Jack Vaughan recently pondered the fate of major technology initiatives, and wondered if SOA is going down the same path as Grid and object-oriented computing. That is, it took some time for these initiatives to come to fruition, and benefits to be delivered. In the meantime, many grew too impatient and declared the methodology to be a failure. Or, as Jack points out, even changed the name — as the initiative formerly known as “Grid” is now known as “Cloud.”
Jack spoke with industry visionary Toufic Boubez about the long-term prospects of SOA. Boubez observed that technology revolutions take about 10 to 15 years to cycle. As Boubez put it:
“Now, lo and behold, we’re ten years into SOA, about the same time frame, where at the beginning everybody thought ‘Alright, service orientation is going to be the next big thing in a couple years, everyone will be doing service orientation and Web services.’ Where, in reality, just because of momentum and all kinds of established procedures and established mechanisms, it takes a while for big corporations and organizations to move. Another 10 to 15 years and here we are. I think we keep forgetting the time it takes for these cycles.”
Reflecting on Boubez’s remarks, Jack Vaughn attributes disillusionment with SOA to the humanest of human responses - impatience and laziness:
“A lot of present disaffection with SOA is just pure laziness – a wish for instant gratification, an aversion to the real work of IT. Like the story of the silver bullet technology, you have heard the admonition that work is hard before. The savvy technologist will measure the true path of cloud computing by thinking in terms of 10 to 15 years as well. It is a good timeframe for sober SOA analysis too. Don’t give up too soon, just to jump on the next merry-go-round.”
Boubez said many SOA efforts dissolved into siloed Web services projects, without an enterprise focus. He pointed out that any SOA efforts requires a solid governance structure behind it, to keep projects on track and keep the business engaged:
“People were building services willy-nilly, and developers who got their hands on a tool kit were building stuff without a long view or an upper view of things. So governance became a problem until people started realizing that we need to get a handle on that. For a variety of reasons, the IT folks need to get a handle on it because of waste–there’s no reuse–as well as security issues and management issues. And the business folks realized they need to get a handle on it because of regulatory issues and because of absolute corporate governance issues.”
Boubez is optimistic that SOA efforts are beginning to gain traction with governance, but warns that virtualization is another emerging initiative that will complicate future SOA projects down the road.
June 26th, 2009
Six ways to make SOA services more reusable
Achieving service reuse is a multi-dimensional problem that ties into technical approaches as well as business governance. In my last post, I surfaced some of JP Morgenthal’s concerns about the reusability of services in their current state (or statefulness).
But there are steps that can be taken to ensure that services that are put out there are as reusable as technically possible. In a new article over at SOA Magazine, Vijay Narayanan explains some of the elements that need to be considered when building a service intended for reuse. (Which, in an SOA context, should be most of them.)
Vijay provides the following guidelines to developers of what will hopefully be reusable services:
Decouple the Physical Transport from the Service Logic: “This will ensure that the service can be bound to additional transports gracefully and provide flexibility offer transports on an as needed basis.”
Provide Standard Interfaces for Service Access: This provides “the flexibility to change implementations over time or offer multiple implementations based on [service level agreement] requirements.”
Offer Standardized Publications of Your Business Processes and Entity Services: Make sure messages aren’t too specific to technologies, or to consumers. “These standard publication messages need to reuse your business schema data types, object definitions, as well as underlying service components.”
Create Service Adapters for Backwards Compatibility: This approach ensures that the code base is thinner due to the reused service logic; isolates and encapsulates the service adapter layer for easier replacement; makes the adapter reusable across transports to avoid custom solutions; and modularizes adapter itself.
Apply Cross-Cutting Concerns Horizontally: “Never put logic for capabilities in a single service because chances are you will surely need them for another one.”
Ensure that Your Services are Interoperable: “Take no chances and ensure that the WSDL document can be consumed successfully by the major technology platforms and that your target consumers can generate proxies and XML data bindings from the WSDL.”
To ensure reuse, Vijay urges developers and architects to make sure “their design decisions are made to decouple services from transport, distribution channel, access pattern and standard messaging interfaces.”
June 26th, 2009
SOA services still too constrained by applications they represent
It almost seemed as if the whole bottom-up versus top-down argument for SOA had been settled, once and for all. The best approach from now on would be bottom-up, with some middle-out, or something like that. None of this “big bang” stuff. Business units will build focused, ROI-generating projects which eventually percolate to their neighbors across the enterprise. Then a critical mass is reached, as more and more people would buy into the growing SOA along the way. The bottom-uppers won this round.
JP Morgenthal, one who never buys into conventional wisdom at face value, questions this concept, however. He says SOA sustainability comes from “analyzing from the top down, not the bottom-up as bottom-up results in tactical solutions that do not conform to the needs of the business over time.”
Aw, JP, say it isn’t so. But he explains why many companies are under the illusion that all you need is loose coupling, and you’re on the road to SOAtown:
“Implementing an SOA design such that real loose-coupling is achieved and that a service does not share a common bond with any other service down to its roots in persistence and all the way up to its consumers, using today’s technology mix, is complex, clumsy and fraught with sandtraps.”
The problem, JP says, is that SOA works best this way when services are stateless — meaning the service “retains no knowledge of the consumer prior to or post usage and has no assumed context of the consumer.” However, he says, most of the business applications services will surface “are rich in user context and assumptions of their environment. Reporting, security and governance are excellent examples of features that are hindered by moving to a loosely-coupled services architecture and, if implemented in a way that leans too heavily toward one particular application’s requirements, limits the service’s ability to operate in multiple application contexts.”
JP also questions the strong emphasis on reuse. The challenge, he says, is that the more specialized a service is, the less reusable it is. This means the above-mentioned services that are anchored to specific applications may not work well in reuse scenarios. Thus, the success of reuse is limited to plain-vanilla services — not a compelling vision for transformation.
June 25th, 2009
Survey: Wall Street looks to cloud technology for its next bailout
Can new technology initiatives help pull Wall Street out of the danger zone? A new survey released by IBM and Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) finds that IT budgets are tight on Wall Street, but things are loosening up, and there’s going to be plenty of demand for new technology initiatives in the near future as firms on the Street look to “transformational” solutions to help better manage risk.
The survey of more than 350 Wall Street IT professionals found a “significant” increase in interest in new technologies and computing models, in particular cloud computing, as firms seek to overcome budgetary restrictions and skills shortages. Almost half of the respondents now see cloud computing as a disruptive force.
The past year has seen marked growth interest in cloud computing. The number of respondents predicting that cloud computing would force significant business change more than doubled (from 21% in 2008 to 46% in 2009), making it the top disruptive technology, ahead of operational risk modeling and mobile technologies.
Major initiatives underway at most Wall Street firms include enhancing electronic trading tools (69%), improving data capacity and bandwidth (58%), and improving technology framework and infrastructure
(58%). It can be assumed that the last item includes SOA efforts.
Budgetary pressures may be beginning to subside: when questioned on their outlook for 2010, just 32 percent of respondents predicted further cuts, with 50 percent forecasting that their IT budgets would remain the same or increase. In fact, the major concerns among Wall Street IT departments have shifted from costs to skills availability.
In 2008, high implementation costs were the number one challenge, cited by 70 percent of respondents. This year saw concerns about limited IT staff take the top spot with 78 percent, up from 56 percent in 2008. The 2009 results show two more major jumps: the challenge of inadequate in-house technology moved from 21 percent to 39 percent, and concerns about governance and senior management rose 13 points to 38 percent.
The survey’s authors say tight budgets and skills shortages are the main catalysts behind the growing interest in cloud computing.
June 24th, 2009
10 data center paradoxes -- widening area networks; iPhone inspiration (2)
Last week, I published the first five megatrends reshaping today’s data centers, pulled from my latest article in Database Trends & Applications.
Here the remaining five of the top 10 shifts, or paradoxes that are turning data centers upside down, rightside up, and many other directions:
Paradox 6: Consumerist Technology Trumps Corporate Computing: Will we someday see iPhone-based data centers? Data center planners are increasingly taking pages from the playbooks of consumer devices and services, which seem to be outpacing corporate IT in innovation.
Paradox 7: Networks Become Too Wide for Wide Area Networks: The rise of remote workforces and cloud computing is far outpacing the abilities of wide area networks (WANs) to keep up.
Paradox 8: IT Finally Starts to Automate Its Own House: IT departments have done a stellar job of automating tasks and processes all across the organization - from call centers to loading docks to benefits management. But the greatest challenge now lies ahead: automating IT management itself — from provisioning; patching process and recovery from routine failures; and setting up, allocating, balancing and correcting the performance of servers and storage.
Paradox 9: Business Intelligence Shared with Other Businesses: BI used to be a secretive process to gather senistive information about operations, custimers, and markets. Now the trend is to open up all this data, via collaborative sites, to partners, customers, and who knows who else. Think about the impact on supply chain management when vendors know in advance what demand is coming downstream, and what’s driving it.
Paradox 10: The Rise of Empowered Users Means the End of Empowered PCs: All sorts of vital services are now coming from the cloud, accessed through a browser.
June 24th, 2009
Six ways to run SOA as an internal cloud business
We probably could argue for another 10 years about the ROI of SOA. Is there ROI? If so, why isn’t there more of it? How do we measure it? How should SOA be sold to the business? Why won’t the business provide more funding?
Or, we could move to a model proposed by Dion Hinchliffe, who proposes that SOA-based services be deployed the same way cloud businesses deploy their open APIs. In other words, managing an SOA effort as an internal business, providing services to the rest of the enterprise, with profits or losses, a la cloud.
As Dion points out, cloud providers face the rigors of the marketplace and have to prove their value every day. So why not model internal service orientation efforts after the experiences of those external providers? As Dion observes:
“The most obvious successes with service-oriented approaches aren’t classical organizations at all. They are Web companies that offer APIs out of a basic need: To build a network of partnerships quickly and cheaply as well as tap into external innovation and inexpensive third-party investment.”
This makes sense, as companies are becoming both consumers and providers of services. This providing and consuming also occurs internally as well as outside of the corporate boundaries. Dion proposes six ways to run an SOA effort along the same lines as a cloud business that has to meet market demands. Is the internal market any different?
Make services easy to use. These should be lightweight, Web-based services, versus the more complex technologies that have been associated with traditional SOA.
Itemize costs and charge as an outside provider would.
Manage internal customer accounts. “Open APIs are all strongly keyed to who is using them and is used for providing customer service, tracking usage, and creating accountability,” Dion says.
Provide for self-service. Public APIs can be used “without a lengthy company-to-company negotiation and partnership process” — it’s all automated and online to accommodate as many customers as possible.
Build a developer community. Today’s APIs nurture developers that build application that consume their services. This is the best way for SOA take off as well.
Allow for flexible use of the API by other business units. Nothing kills an SOA faster than if business units put the kibosh on the way their data is being deployed elsewhere. Dion says “an ideal license is one that gives permission for the consumers of API services to re-use its capabilities in running their business will provide the legal ability to use the API in as flexible a manner as possible.”
There’s another dynamic that Dion doesn’t mention, but worth mentioning. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that IT departments deploying SOA-based services may end up competing with outside service providers. But IT departments have a supreme advantage that the outside providers will never have with their customers. That is, IT executives are often in high-level partnership roles with the business leaders. There’s no reason why internal services can’t be well-focused and well-targeted to pressing business problems or opportunities, the kind only an insider would understand. (An insider would have a better grasp of the politics behind an implementation as well.) IT and SOA proponents need to really leverage and continually demonstrate this advantage to the business. Know the business.
June 22nd, 2009
Vendors being pushed into cloud, kicking and screaming?
Lately, if you have listened to the pronouncements of vendors large and small, they all are enthusiastically embracing cloud computing as the next wave of software and service delivery.
However, the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen and Justin Scheck have a different take on all this happy cloud talk. The way they see it, the recent economic slump and tighter IT budgets have pushed many vendors into the cloud world, kicking and screaming. Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP all run the risk of seeing business move into a lower-margin space, with a longer timeframe to see revenues, they write.
HP Software Chief Tom Hogan even offers an eye-opening comment, admitting to WSJ that the move from traditional to cloud software is “highly disruptive,” and that “shareholders don’t like it, and it’s a real conflict between business strategy and fiduciary duty.”
WSJ says vendors are reluctantly being forced into the cloud world, and offers this more sobering assessment for vendors looking at the cloud space:
“Fully embracing online software is risky for big technology vendors. ‘My bet is that these large incumbents are going to be unable to cross this bridge,’ says Bruce Cleveland, a venture capitalist at InterWest Partners who previously ran the online software business for Siebel Systems. ‘They will not be able to transform their business models.’ … The big software makers are just getting their feet wet in online software, analysts say. But the more online software these large companies sell the more likely they are to hurt their profit margins.”
Noteworthy: Worthen and Scheck don’t use the word ‘cloud’ anywhere in the article, prefering ‘online software.’ Also, they put things in perspective: IDC says online software will account for just $9.5 billion of the $284 billion software businesses this year, but is growing more than 40% a year compared with 3.4% for software overall.
There have been similar worries about the open-source model in recent years. And the same fears gripped the industry 20-odd years ago as enterprises moved to cheaper PC-based software for many things. Some companies survived and thrived through the disruption, others fell by the wayside, new ones sprung up.
June 22nd, 2009
Service orienting, one piece at a time
“Incremental” is perhaps the most important word in the SOA vocabulary. In a recent post, Jack Vaughan reminds us of the case for incremental SOA, backed up by observations from Randy Hefner, Mike Rosen, and the Rolta excellence center.
Rolta advises “two-to four-week sprints” for SOA-based projects, and Rosen advocates “understand your requirements, look for a small incremental approach at addressing those requirements, get continuous feedback from your sponsors and look for some way to prove the value.”
Always good advice. Remember, inch by inch, it’s a cinch. Mile by mile, it’s a trial.
June 19th, 2009
SOA economics: addressing 'boundary costs'
Who’s going to pay for this SOA?
Often, the costs of handling and processing SOA-based services gets spread all over the map. This has implications as SOAs grow in scale and complexity.
Oracle’s Dave Chappell discusses the matter of “boundary costs” as part of a new article on application grids. He explains why boundary costs may not be so clear-cut:
“Consider the following scenario - an XML document that may have originated from an internal application, database, an external business partner, or perhaps converted from an EDI document, needs to be processed by a number of services, which are coordinated by a BPEL process or an ESB process pipeline. The common approach is to place the XML document on the bus and have the bus invoke the services in accordance with the process definition, passing the XML document as part of the service request payload. Each service that needs to process that data will access the XML accordingly. Interaction with a database may also occur.
“However, in practice there are challenges to scalability when using this approach. What is the cost of crossing the boundary from one service to the next? How many times does that cost get incurred in the context of invoking a simple business process? What if the XML document is really large in the multi-megabyte range, or there are lots of them numbering in the thousands, or both?”
The costs can multiply if large XML messages and data files are being passed from one service domain to another. Dave says one way to manage boundary costs is through implementation of application grids that spread compute operations across a distributed network of machines to “lessen the processing and memory requirements of our data consumers - SOA services, application servers, and client applications.”
He adds that using an application grid “can also implement patterns where we pass around references to data, rather than the data, resulting in huge efficiency gains in the communications layer, and dramatically reducing or eliminating the boundary cost.”
Dave raised some good issues in his article, and as SOAs grow in scale and complexity, the loads on servers and infrastructures will grow significantly as well. If one business unit starts the SOA ball rolling, and other units begin accessing and reusing its services, who should pay for all the new equipment and software to support growing demands for reliability and scalability?
June 18th, 2009
10 data center paradoxes -- out of complexity comes simplicity
For every action there is an equally potent reaction, and that is certainly the case in IT developments we’ve been seeing as of late.
Call them paradoxes if you will, and I just published some of them in an article for Database Trends & Applications on the shifting currents reshaping today’s data centers as we know them. Here are five of the top 10 paradoxical trends, based on the views of some leading experts and practitioners. (PDF link to the article here.)
Paradox 1: More Centralization Increases Decentralization of Computing Resources. For large systems sites, there will be a continuing evolution away from single, large general-purpose processors toward more distributed workloads on more cost-effective platforms.
Paradox 2: Tight Economy Drives Eco-Friendly IT. In times gone by, an economic slump meant companies would hunker down and focus on survival, while shelving “do-good” projects such as environmental awareness and protection. Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing for Sun Microsystems, says today’s rough-and-tumble economy may be dampening new projects and innovation, but the downturn is a boon for green IT initiatives. “The unstable economy is forcing IT managers to refocus on consolidation and energy efficiency to cut costs, in addition to a focus on co-location, managed, hosted or cloud computing providers rather than traditional in- house services,”
Paradox 3: Everyone Wants Virtualization; Not Everyone Understands It. A recent survey conducted by Unisphere Research for SHARE, the IBM users’ group found that virtualization is on the radar screens of a majority of enterprises, with server or storage virtualization already in place at many organizations. However, most respondents admit they are still learning and understanding virtualization, and most virtualization efforts are scattered or spotty. Ultimately, a majority of respondents view enterprise virtualization as a long-term IT strategy.
Paradox 4: Centralized Virtualization Leads to “De-localization” of Data. Tim Carbery of Axis Technology put it this way: “Virtualization and cloud storage trends coupled with data privacy and information management techniques will radically transform the concept of managed storage. Once a company has crossed the virtualization boundary, then information can be delivered to the point of impact, whether that is a telecommuter’s home, a researcher in a lab, a doctor’s office or the corporate head office. This ‘de-localization’ of data will then serve as a self-reinforcing catalyst. Collaboration technologies will finish the transformation of corporate office to virtual space.”
Paradox 5: Complexity Increases Simplicity. “There is pressure on data centers to provide more services, scalability and availability than ever before. That’s why cloud computing approaches are gaining in popularity—companies can ramp up capabilities by hiding away the complexity. “We do not see the concept of the data center disappearing, instead, we see the concept of data centers becoming more amorphous,” says Martin Schneider, director of product marketing at SugarCRM. “The emerging trend of cloud computing kind of ties all of the major trends around data centers, in that it enables companies to run far simpler data centers, if not obviating the need for them in some instances.”
I’ll bring out the next five paradoxes in a follow-up post.
June 17th, 2009
Looking for a few good SOA case studies
Are you part of a successful SOA deployment, and would like to share some details with the rest of the world? The world wants to hear from you.
The SOA Consortium, in conjunction with CIO Magazine, is once again holding it’s annual SOA case study competition, and is seeking a few good SOA case studies.
Organizers say the competition is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies, which have successfully delivered business or mission value using the SOA approach.
Similar to the inaugural contest in 2008, the goal of the SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the SOA project must be complete with demonstrated business results.
Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (agility/innovation/flexibility/optimization/resilience), the level and sophistication of cross-organizational collaboration (business/technical), the usage of SOA approaches and supporting technology and lessons learned. In addition to one overall inner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government.
SOA Case Study Competition winners will be announced at the SOA Consortium meeting in San Antonio, Texas on September 16, 2009 and will be featured on the SOA Consortium Website and in a fall issue of CIO magazine and on CIO.com in September. Submissions will be accepted through June 26, 2009.
Last year’s winner was Synovus Financial, along with runners-up Penn National Insurance, Con-Way, Inc., the US Department of Defense, SunGard Financial Systems, and Canada Health Infoway.
June 17th, 2009
SOA, IT and cloud governance converge into 'total services governance'
Is it time to govern the cloud? Should it be the same governance we’re working so hard to apply to service oriented architecture? These are the questions tackled at Dana Gardner’s latest BriefingsDirect analyst podcast, in which I had the opportunity to chime in. (Full transcript available here.)
Dana called the term “total services governance,” which encompasses more than just SOA or IT governance, but also extended enterprise processes, resource consumption, and resource-allocation governance.
Some issues mentioned include:
Reliability. Ron Schmelzer says “people are starting to think more and more about governance, because we see the penalty for what happens when IT fails. People don’t want to be consuming stuff from the cloud or putting stuff into a cloud and risking the fact that the cloud may not be available or the service of the cloud may not be available. They need to have contingency plans, but IT contingency plans are a form of governance.”
Managing Service Lifecycles. David Kelly says “looking at this from a macro perspective, we need managing the cloud-computing life cycle. From the definitions of the services, through the deployment of the services, to the management of the services, to the performance of the services, to the retirement of the services, it’s everything that’s going on in the cloud. As those services get aggregated into larger business processes, that’s going to require different set of governance characteristics.”
Managing Scale. Dana pointed out that “we’re going to need to scale beyond what we do with business-to-employee (B2E). For cloud computing, we’re going to need to see a greater scale for business-to-business (B2B) cloud ecologies, and then ultimately business-to-consumer (B2C) with potentially very massive scale. New business models will demand a high scale and low margin, so the scale becomes important. In order to manage scale, you need to have governance in place. … We’re going to need to see governance on API usage, but also in what you’re willing to let your APIs be used for and at what scale.”
Service Ecology Management. I added to the discussion my thoughts about the emerging loosely coupled business, that cloud is making more of a reality every day. “A lot of companies are taking on the role of a broker or brokerage,” I said. “They’re picking up services from partners, distributors, and aggregators, and providing those services to specific markets. They need the ability to know what services are available in order to be able to discover and identify the assets to build the application or complete a business process. How will we go about knowing what’s out there and knowing what’s been embedded and tested for the organization?”
Over the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about service governance from the SOA experience. These are lessons that are being applied to IT in general, and lessons that will greatly benefit the emerging cloud services space.
June 16th, 2009
SOA drives 'the most important business in the world'
Quote of the Week:
“What first lured me to this industry and has kept me here unapologetically all these years is the notion that information technology is the most important business in the world, that it will continue to bring enormous change to the world, lift people out of starvation, remove the scales from their eyes, and lead to a better world. I really believe this. So before I finish that novel, I’m going to refocus on SOA, which I believe to be the profound computing breakthrough of my lifetime. I love this business. I love almost all of the people I’ve met in it. And I love the precious time I have left to write about it, live in it, and enjoy it.”
June 15th, 2009
What cloud can learn from SOA, and visa-versa
Just how closely are the worlds of service oriented architecture and cloud computing intertwined? More than one can imagine, says Dave Linthicum. Dave is in the process of publishing an authoritative work, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, that connects the dots between SOA and cloud. (Book now available on Amazon, will be released in October.)
In the book, Dave describes what cloud computing could learn from SOA:
Service governance: While governance is fundamental to well-executed SOA, “there is little notion of governance today within cloud computing, and thus there is little control and implementation of policies.”
Driving from the architecture: SOA initiatives begin with the architecture first. Cloud, on the other hand, tends to start with the resources on demand. “With cloud computing, the need for a well-thought-out architecture does not go out the window; indeed, it’s even more important, considering that you’re extending the architecture out of the firewall.”
SOA also can even learn a thing or two from cloud computing, and Dave details some of these elements:
Service design: Since they’re meant for internal groups, SOA services tend not to be too well-designed. On the other hand, cloud services may be setting good examples to follow. “those who deploy services in the cloud such as Amazon, Force.com, and others, have done a pretty good job with service design. You really must do a good job to rent the darn things out.”
Service expandability: SOA services typically are not designed to scale, and thus, “the ability to expand services within a SOA is typically a painful and expensive process,” Dave says. “Cloud computing providers had to figure out scaling rather quickly.”
In many ways, cloud is an extension of the principals and practices we’ve been developing and finessing for the past few years with SOA, Dave points out. “Clearly, SOA and cloud computing go hand-in-hand,” he points out. “Cloud computing is just the ability to leverage new platforms and resources that you don’t happen to own. Nothing really changes outside of that, including the need to do SOA right. However, cloud computing is accelerating the adoption of SOA by providing aspects of SOA on-demand. SOA can learn a lot from the clouds, and the clouds can learn a lot from SOA.”
June 11th, 2009
Why does 'complex event processing' have to be so complex?
I’ve always felt that “complex event processing” is a term that scares people away. Perhaps there needs to be a softer way to describe what this thing is — perhaps just plain old “event processing” will do? Or perhaps “sense and respond, times 100,000″?
You don’t need to be a state-of-the-art, completely online organization to move to event processing. David Olson, director of CEP product marketing for Progress Software’s Apama unit, says from a technical standpoint, the fundamental system requirement for event processing is having a server to capture and correlate events, apply appropriate rules to an event stream, and send the information to a dashboard or portal.
But the success of an event processing implementation is a management challenge, he says. “One of the more complicated endeavors that people have to figure out is what events make sense to them, and what types of patterns do they need to look for?”
I recently had the opportunity to join David, along with Brenda Michelson, principal with Elemental Links, in a rousing roundtable discussion on the impacts of event processing in what has been a very eventful year for businesses. (Full transcript available here.)
For example, financial services has been at the center of the economic storm over the past 18 months. If these companies had more advanced capabilities to process and analyze key events, they might have been able to head off many of the slips and slides that led to the financial crisis of 2008, David and Brenda agreed. Still, there are many lessons being gleaned from the whole experience that will benefit all industries for years to come.
“I think [Complex Event Processing] could have been used in some situations that got us into this financial crisis,” says Olson.”Perhaps we should have employed CEP a few more years ago in order to help stem the tide of what has happened. But there’s certainly a lot of learning that’s been going on as people go back and research what has happened, to figure out what kind of rules they should put in place in the future to make it happen again.”
Brenda pointed out that millions of events occur across enterprises every day — from stock prices bouncing to soda cans shifting on a pallet in a warehouse. The challenge is being able to capture and process the events that have the greatest impact on the business. “Event processing is what discerns is if that thing that happened is notable,” she explained:
“Is it important to me? Is it important to my business? Do I need to act on it? And is that notability by itself, or perhaps its notable because of a couple of other events that are going on? Is it just my business that’s bad, or is it the entire credit market that’s tanked? And then once you discern that notability.. you decide what am I going to do with that event next? Am I going to forward it along into an event channel? am I going to trigger some kind of downstream action?”
David elaborated on that theme and pointed out that “its not sufficient just to be able to capture the events and perhaps store them for future use, since the volume and the velocity can be quite great in certain circumstances.”
There is great potential being demonstrated in financial services in terms of unearthing fraud, David points out. “One of the exciting areas in CEP, especially in capital markets is the whole notion of surveillance, where there are a fair amount of rules that look for abnormal patterns of activity,” he says.
“For example, one of our customers uses it to monitor actions that could indicate insider trading, or joint trading opportunities where two traders trade large volumes of a symbol, but not large enough that it tips anybody’s radar to abnormal activity.But when these joint trading activities occur either ahead or behind a news feed, that could indicate to us there’s unusual activity going on here, and we should do something with this particular symbol that’s being traded. In the past, trying to catch those types of activities could take months of auditing in order to figure out that something bad happened. And in the capital markets space, minutes of something bad happening could be billions of dollars.”
June 10th, 2009
Why SOA really, really matters in a cloud computing world
Back in early 2006, I published a piece on the impact of delivering SOA-ready services via online, on-demand venues such as online marketplaces. Here is an update on the piece, revised to meet today’s cloud computing realities. Since I wrote the first piece, we have seen many of the principles coming to fruition.
So here is an updated version of why SOA means a lot more than integration or IT efficiencies:
SOA and cloud computing will help bring service consumers and publishers together; this could have enormous ramifications for the way we build systems and manage our organizations.
I am a passionate believer in the power of technology, as an enabler of entrepreneurship and organizational transformation. I have long advocated flattening the organizational hierarchy, and pushing decision-making down to the managers and employees who deal with customers and production on a day-to-day basis.
That’s why I am a big supporter of Web services and SOA, because these approaches open up new possibilities and opportunities for developing an entrepreneurial culture within organizations, as well as spurring new ideas for start-ups. More than anything, Web services and SOA are paving the way for the composite or loosely coupled company – which may be an entity that exists purely as an aggregation of third-party services, provided on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands. Most of these services will be passed through as Software as a Service, both from within the enterprise and from outside.
Is this entrepreneurial spirit something that larger enterprises, particularly the Global 1000, would be capable or willing to digest? After all, larger enterprises usually have their own humongous internal IT development shops. But, some observers point out that some of the largest and most progressive companies may, in fact, be the most enthusiastic embracers of the virtual, componentized way of doing business.
Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, for one, believes that the best-run companies are becoming “orchestrators” of networks of services, rather than actual producers. Sawhney quipped at a conference that some mobile phone companies provide a good example of this orchestrator role, in that “they don’t do anything themselves, they just collect the money.” Even Cisco comes close to this orchestrator model, he pointed out: “85 percent of Cisco’s products are never touched by a Cisco employee.”
To achieve the orchestration Sawhney talks about, especially in terms of software-based services, companies may find their best option is to turn to third-party marketplaces that can provide the necessary software on demand. Cloud vendors offer online marketplaces in which enterprises can tap into services that they may or may not have the time or inclination to build. Why reinvent the wheel by having your staff spend time building service components, when you can quickly subscribe to a component, that’s been tested and uptime certified, and pay for it on as-used basis?
So, I, as the software entrepreneur, could write my service, which could be a system that tracks the number and costs of Styrofoam cups used within corporate cafeterias. I would submit Joe’s Styrofoam Cup Accounting Service to a marketplace, which would validate the quality and uptime of my service, and make it accessible to enterprises and ISVs across the globe. An ISV such as SAP may pick up on it, and add it to their next enterprise release as an additional management feature. The corporate accounting department that installs the next SAP release, then, may see the value in keeping track of cup expenses (especially if it’s a real caffeine-driven work culture). They then turn on the feature that accesses the marketplace, and Joe’s Styrofoam Cup Accounting Service. Do I make my millions this way? No, more likely, I will make a few pennies per transaction. Still, these things can add up quickly.
Cloud computing is pushing some software vendors to change their models to component delivery, perhaps based on a micropayment business model as I alluded to above. This makes plenty of room not only for small start-ups, but also for development shops within traditional enterprises that have great ideas. We’ll see the emergence of the corporation-as-service-orchestrator phenomena.
Bob Walsh, author of a book entitled MicroISV: From Vision to Reality, validates this thinking. In his book, he discusses how entrepreneurs and technologists can ride the new wave can the rise of smaller application providers that can put the components in place for a complete solution. He recently told me that “while most MicroISVs are focused on either the desktop or providing a stand-alone service, I think you will see more and more MicroISVs as ‘parts.’ You are already seeing micro-ISV’s providing add-on services in shipping, transportation and logistics; more will follow.”
Just as businesses are evolving into orchestrator roles, so are the systems that support them. As Sawhney so aptly put it, “five years from now, the concept of an application will be obsolete. They will all be services, combined, mixed, matched and reused as needed.”
June 9th, 2009
SOA as 'iTunes for business': interesting analogy
For quite some time, we have talked about the concept of accessing SOA-ready services through public online marketplaces, and how that could shake up the way we approach IT. We’re seeing manifestations of this model through cloud computing.
But I wish I could have expressed it the way George Ravich, chief marketing officer at Fundtech, just put it in a ComputerWeekly interview: Have services available the way iTunes are available online, ready to plug into a framework. “the SOA service catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the iTunes playlist has had on listening to music.”
Fundtech provides financial services via the cloud, and is focusing on other SOA-based services.
SOA application lists should provide services — such as customer authentication — that can be plugged into a company’s “playlist.” As Ravich illustrates:
“Prior to the iPod, people listened to songs on a vinyl record or a CD in the order that the publisher determined. If you wanted to play several songs from different albums, it was a complicated and time-consuming activity,. Now, with an iPod, you can take the individual songs you own and create an endless number of play lists. Each song track is reusable in different settings and situations, under the full control of the listener.”
“Similarly, prior to SOA, enterprise applications trapped business processes within inflexible workflows. Without extensive IT development the reuse of any single business process became unfeasible within these systems, leading to multiple versions of the same process being developed separately for different applications and channels.”
Maybe the SOA world needs a Steve Jobs-like visionary to package and sell SOA in such a fashion. Or, perhaps, we’ve already been doing it all along — without all the pizazz and hoopla.
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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