Category: SOA Events
November 20th, 2009
Panel: do cloud computing economic advantages break down in enterprises?
The purpose of information technology is “to provide compute and storage. That’s it. full stop. That compute and storage can be provided by mainframes, private data centers, distributed networks, or by the cloud.”
- Allan Leinwand, venture capitalist
At this week’s Interop conference in New York, I heard a great panel discussion, moderated by AT&T’s Joe Weinman, on the economics of cloud computing. Weinman was joined by Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services, Allan Leinwand of Panorama Capital (which invests in cloud vendors), Andy Rhodes of Dell, Harris Tilevitz of Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, and William Forrest of McKinsey & Co., author of the last spring’s watershed report on “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing.”
A public cloud provider, private cloud operator, consultant, network provider, and venture capitalist debate cloud’s business value
McKinsey’s Forrest, for one, stated that while his research “found significant amounts of workloads today could be moved to public cloud providers,” it still “wouldn’t make economic sense to move large chunks of data centers to the cloud.”
Nevertheless, he predicts, “there will be a continued move to the cloud, as there are increasingly attractive economics over people building their own data centers.” He says that these economics keep getting better because “the public cloud guys have built a better box, they buy in volume, and operate more efficiently than most enterprises.”
“The idea that you buy an individual server, that is going away. You either buy racks of servers or go to the cloud.”
Amazon’s Selipsky, needless to say, was bullish on the cloud computing paradigm. He noted that in a government CIO rountable last week, Vicek Kundra, the US CIO, “certified that 45% of all government IT could run on public clouds.”
Selipsky went on to say that cloud computing is suitable for both large and small enterprises. “For start-ups, its a total no-brainer. We also have a lot of big enterprises using our services.” He foresees many enterprises moving to a hybrid cloud environment in the coming years. And, he noted that cloud providers also bring another advantage beyond cost savings: “The biggest benefit of the cloud is that is it enables focus. You can take the intellectual capital of your staff and focus on your business — not IT.”
VC Leinwand, however, says he still sees a “huge gap” between cloud services offered and the ability to effectively manage them in an enterprise environment. “Cloud storage costs one-tenth of onsite data storage,” he points out. But what about configuration, integration, data deduplication, and monitoring? There’s a gap between what the enterprise is used to doing behind the firewall and what cloud providers can do.” He added that he is seeking to fund companies that can help close that gap.
AT&T’s Weinman, for his part, raised doubts about the sustainability of cloud computing economics, which may break down as enterprise management requirements come into play. “I’m not sure there are any unit-cost advantages that are sustainable among large enterprises,” he said. A more likely scenario that will be seen is hybrid adoption of cloud computing in some areas, and private capabilities for others where it makes business sense.
Another option is private clouds, and Skadden’s Tilevitz reports great success at his global law firm of 2,000 partners. Originally, the initiative started after September 11, 2001, as a way to ensure business continuity by operating three regional data centers. Now, built on a Citrix environment, the virtualized environment has evolved into an internal cloud of sorts, from which the firm’s various office access online services. For example, he related, a partner may need to load five million pages of documentation into an online format overnight. “We have more than a petabyte of image data that we keep for seemingly forever that we use for litigation,” he said.
Economies of scale have also kicked in as well. “Our expenses for this private cloud have dropped over time,” Tilevitz said. “I see it as almost a reversion back to the mainframe world. Everyone is now using applications and data remotely.” Tilevitz also said his firm is looking at becoming a “public” cloud provider of sorts as well, selling excess disk capacity online.
November 12th, 2009
US defense department IT managers describe latest assault on complex and siloed IT systems
A vexing issue that comes along with service orientation is figuring out who will fund the services being shared across the enterprise. Things get even more interesting in really large organizations with lots of multiple business lines. So you can imagine the complexity of service funding in something as large and complicated as, say, the US Department of Defense.
Funding, establishing user dialog, federation, quicker turnarounds are latest challenges for DoD
Speaking a a recent roundtable on government SOA implementations, Dan Risacher, staff member with the CIO’s office at the Department of Defense (DoD), says DoD is bullish on SOA, and is undertaking serious efforts to service orient its multiple systems. However, one of the greatest challenges is deciding how various services get funded, Risacher says. “In the defense department, we have a tiered structure — very high-level DoD and military departments underneath that. One of the particular challenges with SOA within an enterprise environment, whether that be a federal agency or business, you have different business units each providing their own services. Often the chargeback and the incentive models are the greatest difficulties. We’re struggling with that.”
The roundtable, hosted by Dave Chesebrough, president of the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), also included Matthew Swartz, branch head of Enterprise Initiatives for the US Navy, and Mike Darretta, JBoss solutions architect for Red Hat, and covered issues such as funding, integration, and paybacks.
Risacher said DoD formulated and published its SOA strategy in May 2007. The goals of the effort are to “get people to provide services on the network, make sure that those services are visible, accessible and understandable to other users, incentivize people to use them, improvise and use them, and figure out how to manage them from a network operations standpoint as well as a governance standpoint.”
There is a centrally funded model for SOA-based services that exists within the intelligence community, but Risacher says it may be a difficult model for DoD to follow. “The problem is lots of people use a service, and that makes the cost go up — but doesn’t provide any additional resources and revenues to the organization providing that service.”
Overall, however, a service-oriented approach is helping DoD speed up the application development and deployment process, and better target functionality where it is needed. “We have a concept we call ‘communities of interest,’ in which we get groups of related users together who need those capabilities to actually help define what do the services need to be,” Risacher says. “We don’t want to have to wait and figure out in great detail what those services are before we start providing them. But having that dialog enables us to provide services that are actually responsive to what people need.”
The US Navy is also taking an enterprise view of its information technology, according to Matt Swartz. The availability of the Navy Enterprise Portal, along with the Navy Enterprise Information System (NEIS) is seen as a key “initial tactical step towards enabling SOA-type services or the ability for our users in the Navy to access enterprise services.” The various systems and portals are being integrated and federated through an enterprise service bus, he says. “We see this as one day potentially being an enterprise service bus for other capabilities or enterprise SOA services across the Navy, and ultimately connect and federate with other DoD services” he adds.
These capabilities are now delivered via two platforms — Oracle Fusion middleware for NEIS and Microsoft SharePoint for the portal, Swartz elaborates. “We belive that the portal environment will allow us to bring distributed applications together, and also enable information sharing that not currently available to the sailor or the warfighter in these distributed environments.”
For the defense department, SOA has been an incremental journey, versus a huge sweep of its technology landscape, says Risacher. “We’re focusing on things that are scalable, cost effective. How do I do things in a spiral kind of capability… where I’m fielding new capabilities as I go along — rather than trying to take a big-bang waterfall type of approach, trying to figure it out all up front in the requirements phase.”
There is enormous cost-savings potential as well, especially from an integration standpoint, he added. “For large DoD systems, we often find that each connection costs $1 million a year to maintain – that’s not an exaggeration. When I have to go out pay one big defense integrator and some other second defense integrator to make their systems talk to each other — and inevitably something changes either in the interconnect or the data standards change — it ends up being very expensive to have a whole lot of those links. So I’m trying to get that down to where we have a much smaller set of interfaces, rather than a very large set of interconnections.”
The name of the game is faster turnaround of IT capabilities, Risacher continued. “We’re trying to influence acquisition strategy needs to focus on smaller and shorter deliverables, so we can task as we learn, reduce risks, and get those capabilities out faster. We’re focusing on standards and open architecture, and how to share some IT resources. It’s a big, difficult shift for an organization as large as defense department.”
It’s interesting to see how a large, complex organization such as DoD is wrestling with many the same issues — and sees the same kinds of opportunities as smaller, commercial organizations. As DoD and other federal agencies work through some of the issues around service orientation — such as governance, funding, federation, and security — there will be some best practices emerging for private businesses as well.
November 6th, 2009
Event processing means more than 'speeding up' existing systems
Complex event processing — now made possible by service-oriented architecture principles — represents the next stage of business intelligence. However, much work needs to be done to reach this capability.
Complex event processing requires a different mindset and skills
A ebizQ’s latest SOA in Action conference, I had the opportunity to moderate a session with Gartner’s Roy Schulte, CalTech’s Dr. Mani Chandy (CalTech), and IBM’s Frank Chisolm in an informative discussion about applying event processing as a strategy for businesses seeking to remain competitive in the years ahead.
However, Roy cautioned, event processing capabilities don’t just automatically pop up, even among companies with the most advanced BI infratstructures. “The way you get your systems to be more smart fast and agile is by having the systems designed correctly, and in most cases that means more use of the event processing design methodology,” he says. “You can’t just take a conventionally designed system and just speed it up to accomplish the goals that people want to do.”
While the technology now exists to build CEP, the methodology requires a different mindset among companies. “The limitation that we have today is that there are not enough people around who understand how to design systems that operate in this fashion,” Roy says. “They don’t understand continuoius intelligence or complex event processing.”
Complex event processing requires continuous streams of information from multiple sources. The good news is that CEP need not be so complex, and, in fact, over the next few years, systems that sense and respond to events will be as commonplace as business intelligence systems are today.
Mani, considered one of the early visionaries of complex event processing, said the “PC-cubed” formula (three Ps and three Cs) will drive CEP forward over the next few years:
- Price – The price of managing data sources will continue to drop.
- Pervasiveness – Sensors, such as mobile phones, have become pervasive.
- Performance – “Enterprises have access to immense computing power that can be harnessed through event processing,” Mani says. And now, “parallel, distributed, and cloud computing create ideal environments for event processing.”
- Celerity - “Businesses and consumers demand swift action,” Mani points out. “You expect to be notified immediately if your plane is late.”
- Connectedness – The world is more interconnected. Your company may need to respond immediately to an earthquake in China, a flood in India. Event processing applications help detect events all over the globe.”
- Complexity – “Businesses have become more complex, and expect IT to help with increasingly complex problems.”
As if laying out the case for complex event processing as “PC” doesn’t clarify enough, Mani also explained how a mnemonic — A, E, I, O, U (but not sometimes Y) — describes the CEP phenomenon:
- A — Adaptability: “The event pattern has two advantages, one is loose coupling for application integration, and the other is sense and response,” Mani said. “App integration because producers and consumers are coupled in a loose way without knowing about each other. Its easy to add or change the producers and consumers of a system. With the sense and respond aspect, an example is scheduling railroad crews — a complex problem, a sense-and-response problem. Because unscheduled events happen all the time, smart railroads are using event processing to adapt.”
- E — Exceptions: “Computers have to analyze torrents of data to extract nuggets,” said Mani. “These nuggets are the events that require a response. A characteristic of smart people and smart systems is that they mange by exception.. they perform continuing operations effectively, bit they continue to detect and respond exceptional situations. Event processing helps separate the critical from non-critical.”
- I — Instrimentation: “Successful businesses manage exceptional events successfully,” according to Mani. “Event processing is used to instrument and monitor the exception and the normal. You will see a rapid rise in business instrumentation and event processing for to improvement of business activity in the next decade.”
- O — Outside: “1960s-90s enterprise IT dealt with mainly IT inside the enterprise. Now the enterprise is responding the events externally,” said Mani. “The enterprise monitors actions by the government, its competitors, its suppliers, and its best customers. The ability to sense and respond to events out side the enterprise using event processing is a significant competitive advantage.”
- U — Unanticipated events: “Enterprises develop event process applications to handle certain types of that they expect, and must also deal with conditions that they don’t expect,” Mani explained. “Any significant deviations are detected by an event processing application which then sends information about this deviation to appropriate people before the analysis.”
Dr. Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte have just puiblished a new book on the subject, entitled “Event Processing - Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies.”
November 4th, 2009
Gartner: 10 reasons why both sides of the SOA debate have it wrong
Pro-SOA view: SOA is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Anti-SOA view: SOA is toast.
SOA moderate view: Let’s just worry about baking service orientation into our business processes where we can.
I just had the pleasure of hosting a Webcast keynote with Gartner’s Yefim Natis over at the ebizQ “SOA in Action’ event, and Yefim did a great job of popping the myths around SOA — not only among the naysayers, but among the over-optimistic SOA proponents as well. Instead, Yefim urges a balanced middle course with SOA, with a serious emphasis on what it can do for the business.
Here are the 10 most common myths — promulgated by both SOA “fanatics” as well as naysayers — that need to be put to rest (no pun intended):
SOA Fanatic Myth #1 - Services were invented in the IT department and are spreading out to the business. This myth assumes that SOA architects and designers “will be bringing solutions to the business that the business itself couldn’t invent,” Yefim says. However, he observes, “encapsulated functions have existed in business forever. This is how business is structured.” Instead, SOA is about improving the “ability of software designers and software architects to model the real world better. Software is not bringing the solution to the business, its better understanding the business.”
SOA Fanatic Myth #2 - SOA applications are assembled from pre-built components. “SOA is not a Lego game,” Yefim says. “Although service oriented systems indeed include encapsulated components, or services, they also include clients, batch components which are not service oriented, and include legacy systems that need to be connected to.”
SOA Fanatic Myth #3 - Sharing or reusing application logic is the main benefit of SOA. “In reality, a successful environment will have reuse of about 30%, so that is a ballpark number where you should feel good about your level of reuse,” Yefim says. “If that’s the case, it means many organizations will have less than 30% — so reuse is not the primary benefit, although it is one of the benefits of service oriented architecture. There are many other things, such a making your internal architecture more manageable, having greater extensibility, and applications that function a lot better when they are service oriented.”
SOA Fanatic Myth #4 - SOA eliminates the need for application integration. No matter how effective your SOA infrastructure, you’re still going to need enterprise application integration, Yefim says. What SOA does do is “introduce a consistency to the architecture, as well as tools and standards that help application integration.”
SOA Fanatic Myth #5 - SOA reduces the cost of IT. It may help reduce IT costs in the log run, but early on, “investment in SOA costs in fact costs more,” Yefim says. “Not because SOA is more complex, but just because when you do something new, you have to understand new approach, you have to train people, you have to buy new tools — and that all is costs.” What SOA does do is “shift the costs, distribute the costs differently.”
Yefim also took the occasion to refute some of the negative things also being said about SOA as well. Here the top five naysayer myths about SOA:
SOA Naysayer Myth #1 — SOA introduces new complications and new problems. “That might be true, depending on what you were doing before,” Yefim says. “After all, complications and problems are all relative to prior experience.” However, he points out, “most issues that have to do with deploying and establishing service-oriented systems are not issues of SOA; they’re issues of distributed computing, or of modern grid based computing networks.” Without SOA, he says, companies would “probably be facing the same complications and issues.” At least SOA provides a more consistent approach to tackling these problems.
SOA Naysayer Myth #2 — SOA is nothing new, it’s hype, it’s taking old wine and trying to sell it in a new bottle. SOA is merely a set of coarse-grained remote procedure calls (RPCs). SOA builds upon earlier models of distributed computing and RPCs, but it’s something different, Yefim points out. “SOA is intended to address a business topology of the business functionality of the application, whereas RPCs were intended to simply distribute an application.”
SOA Naysayer Myth #3 — SOA is doomed because Web services don’t work well enough. This widely held misconception is based on the view that SOA is entirely based on SOAP. “There’s nothing in common between the two, yet people confuse SOA with SOAP. SOA is not about Web services — Web services is one of the ways of establishing connectivity between the clients and the services of SOA.”
SOA Naysayer Myth #4 — SOA is hard to sell because the business can’t see the benefits. This is probably true for basic-level SOA, but as more companies move into advanced SOA, business benefits will become more apparent, Yefim says. “After all, SOA is an architecture, and the business sees software as a means to a goal, rather than the goal in itself.’ However, as SOA begins to support new initiatives such as event-driven processing, business awareness may grow. “Event-driven SOA has very important components to it that allow direct benefits, clear benefits to business operations, to any business that wants to gain control over its overall IT information environment or wants to build situation awareness.” Event-driven SOA, Yefim adds, “is the foundation for business activity monitoring, business intelligence, situational awareness. All of these directly serve business.”
SOA Naysayer Myth #5 — SOA is obsolete, and its time to move on. Indeed, the industry is probably ready for a new round of buzzwords, Yefim says. “There’s no intrigue anymore in basic SOA. We know how to do it, it’s not talked about as much as before.” But, he asks, “What are you going to move on to? The only alternatives you’re going to find to SOA are going to be advanced forms of SOA.” [See SOA Nay-sayer Myth #4, above...]
November 2nd, 2009
Analyst: seven ways to get SOA back on track
SOA is still being held back by perceptions that the methodology is a set of IT best practices, versus business best practices.
In a recent presentation, Forrester Research’s Randy Heffner provided an analysis of what’s holding SOA back, and what it takes to move it forward. I had the opportunity to join Randy in an informative session on what should make SOA tick.
1- SOA is about good design, not cool technology.
2 - SOA is about business design, to provide flexibility for how and where via what channels we do business, to interface with any partner or customer.
3 - SOA requires big change, but take it slowly and incrementally. You don’t have to get all of SOA “right” to get value out of SOA.
4 - Good designs requires good governance. Good governance has participants, bad governance has victims.
Randy cited Forrester survey data that showed general acceptance of SOA principles within a majority of enterprises, but many pockets of trouble. About 18% to 25% of Forrester’s survey group said they are still “struggling with SOA, and they’re not going to expand further until they figure it out.”
What are they trying to figure out? Randy points out that “SOA is a diificult and complex initiative,” and to succeed requires “reframing from some of the broad messages you hear in the industry.” Companies struggle with SOA, he explains, because, first, “they treat SOA as a technology” rather than a business transformation. Second, they “treat SOA as objects and components,” and third, “they over-focus on reuse,” which is but one of the benefits.
Randy suggests seven “fixes” that can help get SOA off the narrow technology project track and onto the business services track:
Fix 1 — Use SOA to create a business model. “Use SOA based bus services to insert a layer of simplicity around the business where you most need it.”
Fix 2 — Build service portfolios, not service libraries. “The library view can be a very haphazard, amnesic way to manage services. Service developers will forget what services are out there…. We’re trying to leverage projects, and put them within this broader strategic context withoin our porfolio.”
Fix 3 — Adopt a “street-level” strategy to address both short and long-term SOA. “We need to move away from this big-bang approach to SOA.” A street-level strategy is adaptable to any shifts in the business — such as hard versus good economic times, Randy adds.
Fix 4 — Avoid the reuse trap. “Yes, reuse is a good thing, and you will see benefits. But it’s not all about reuse, it’s about the right design, and reuse is the side effect that should be happening as you’re doing good design.”
Fix 5 — Adopt a variety of SOA funding strategies. You can get SOA money in and of itself, get SOA funding for solutions that use SOA, or get it through training or R&D programs. Most SOA funding comes from solutions-oriented projects, Randy says.
Fix 6 — Do SOA governance. If a company was event doing just one or two of the 12 best governance best practices covered in Forrester surveys, it “was correlated with higher satisfaction with SOA,” Randy says. “Even a little SOA governance leads to satisfaction.”
Fix 7 — Do more SOA governance. “If you’re doing SOA right, SOA is far from dead,” Randy says.”And SOA governance will keep it on track.”
October 26th, 2009
EAI: square peg trying to fit into round hole of data integration
There’s a large gaping hole in the capabilities enterprise application integration (EAI) – and its successor, enterprise service buses – can deliver. Current middleware strategies fall short in addressing data integration and data quality issues – and this is costing organizations.
These are points raised by Dave Linthicum and Ash Parikh in a recent Webinar, I had the opportunity to moderate, posted over at the ebizQ site. Dave, who literally wrote the book on “Enterprise Application Integration” back in the 1990s, says EAI and ESB approaches are not suited for today’s high-transaction data integration needs, and have great limitations. But still, many organizations persist in attempting to plug in these types of solutions into vexing business problems that require a more holistic architectural approach. “There are a lot of people trying to put square pegs into round holes,” he says.
Dave says that while the square-peg-in-a-round-hole approach will work for a while, it’s far more costly in the long run. “With EAI and ESB technology, there are certain instances and problem domains where they’re a fit,” he explains. “But you need to understand there are certain limitations that are part of that technology that should be considered. Ultimately, if you don’t consider them and pick those technology approaches anyway, you’re going to start running into walls that are very difficult to back up and get around as you move the architecture forward.”
I posted a summary of points raised in the Webinar here at the Perspectives site.
October 26th, 2009
SOA, Roman, Greek, or Modern: you don't 'do' architecture
Service oriented architecture is not a thing that you do, and it definitely isn’t a thing that you buy. But it is something tangible, a style if you will, just as Roman, Greek or Modern are styles of architecture.
Why the fussing about semantics? This was a key point discussed over and over again by members of the SOA Manifesto Working Group, and an issue that is endlessly creating confusion in the market. In fact, it’s a semantic slip that even members of the group had to work at to keep in check.
There have been some comments raised about the Manifesto’s preamble, which said the following:
“Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service orientation.”
Yes this opening statement may seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious, like “the sky is blue” or “the ocean is wet” or “Hollywood makes crappy movies” or something like that. But there was a lot of discussion around this statement, and the intent was to dispel the notion that SOA is this thing that you do or can buy. In fact, vendors and consultants have been abusing these semantics and milking millions from customers with this notion for years.
That makes as much sense as the Romans going out and buying their architecture. It was important to put this notion to rest (definitely no pun intended) once and for all, and it was felt by the group that this was such an important statement that it was elevated from originally being a principle to the preamble to the entire document. And “applying service orientation” is the action that goes into building an SOA-enabled infrastructure.
October 23rd, 2009
SOA Manifesto unveiled
As mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to join a group of highly motivated and very smart people at the SOA Symposium in Rotterdam to formulate what is being called the SOA Manifesto. Here is the final version of the document, spelling out the core values and related principles that should be part of service orientation and SOA. Hopefully, they will help guide your thinking on the SOA journey:
SOA Manifesto
Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service orientation.
We have been applying service orientation to help organizations consistently deliver sustainable business value, with increased agility and cost effectiveness, in line with changing business needs.
Through our work we have come to prioritize:
- Business value over technical strategy
- Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
- Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration
- Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
- Flexibility over optimization
- Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection
That is, while we value the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
SOA Manifesto Guiding Principles
We follow these principles:
- Respect the social and power structure of the organization.
- Recognize that SOA ultimately demands change on many levels.
- The scope of SOA adoption can vary. Keep efforts manageable and within meaningful boundaries.
- Products and standards alone will neither give you SOA nor apply the service orientation paradigm for you.
- SOA can be realized through a variety of technologies and standards.
- Establish a uniform set of enterprise standards and policies based on industry, de facto, and community standards.
- Pursue uniformity on the outside while allowing diversity on the inside.
- Identify services through collaboration with business and technology stakeholders.
- Maximize service usage by considering the current and future scope of utilization.
- Verify that services satisfy business requirements and goals.
- Evolve services and their organization in response to real use.
- Separate the different aspects of a system that change at different rates.
- Reduce implicit dependencies and publish all external dependencies to increase robustness and reduce the impact of change.
- At every level of abstraction, organize each service around a cohesive and manageable unit of functionality.
October 23rd, 2009
Anne Thomas Manes: SOA can be resurrected, here's how
SOA may have its detractors, but done right, it lays the groundwork for a new service-oriented paradigm going forward.
I’m at this year’s International SOA Symposium in Rotterdam, and the prevailing theme is “Next-Gen” SOA, in which we see service-orientation emerge from its bout with the skeptics to take a stronger role within the enterprise.
Thomas Erl, the conference organizer and prolific author on SOA topics, launched the event, noting that we are moving into a period of Next-Generation SOA, with the foundation of principles and practices being laid within many entreprises.
Next up was Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group, who declared in a post at the beginning of the year that “SOA” — at least as we knew it — was “dead.” However, the second part of Anne’s post was “Long Live Services,” which is the theme that she picked up on in her keynote address.
“Business wasn’t really interested in buying something called ‘SOA,” she declared, adding that in her own research, fewer than 10% of companies have seen significant business value in their efforts.
However, that is not to diminish the importance of service oriented architecture. “The average IT organization is in a mess,” she says. “The average business has 20 to 30 core capabilities. Why do they need 2,000 applications to support those 20-30 capabilities?”
“We should be service orienting everything we do,” she contends. What’s getting in the way is the feeling that an “SOA program” needs to be launched to get there, she states. “We have an opportunity at this point to resurrect SOA. We need a different approach, one based on architectural principles.”
Anne also observed that current cloud computing initiatives bear a striking resemblance to SOA efforts. “All the discussions I hear about cloud are the same discussions we had about cloud four to five years ago,” she says. “How are applications in the cloud going to talk to the applications back home without intrinsic interoperability?”
I also had the opportunity to lead a panel discussion later in the day, joined by Anne, along with Microsoft’s John Devadoss (great to finally meet you in person, John!), Stefan Tilkov, and Clemen Utschig-Utschig of Oracle. Anne further elaborated on her thinking behind the “Dead” post, emphasizing her point that both end-user organizations and vendors are still too wrapped up in the idea of delivering some type of “SOA” package, versus delivering agility and flexibility. However, she noted, “Everything we do should be service oriented.”
Stefan Tilkov agreed with Anne on that point, but took issue on whether cloud computing represents some new phase of SOA. Cloud represents a different type of functionality and best practices, he emphasized.
I’m also part of the SOA Manifesto Working Group, which is meeting at the Symposium to draft a set of overarching principles to guide SOA efforts. We expect to announce the final document at the end of the conference — I’ll keep you posted.
October 19th, 2009
HR specialist asks Oracle: where's the 'fusion'?
In an analysis of last week’s announcement at Oracle OpenWorld that Oracle would finally be releasing its Fusion Applications next year, HR technology specialist Bill Kutik wondered out loud where and when we’ll see Fusion HCM (Human Capital Management) emerge in an SOA-ready configuration.
Despite Larry Ellison’s public pronouncement at the end of the show that Oracle will soon pull the trigger and release the new offerings, including Fusion HCM, Bill is still skeptical as ever. As he put it in a recent editorial in Human Resource Executive:
“From the short demos CEO Larry Ellison showed on stage at Oracle Open World — and even after examining enlarged screen shots from them — Oracle Fusion HCM seems to be only on par with our best current software.”
Bill alludes to the original promise of SOA in this regard, in which analysts and vendors predicted that new capabilities could be assembled in a relatively easy fashion to meet changes in the business requirements — a la Lego blocks. It seems that’s been a difficult state to reach, he says — and wonders if Fusion Applications will meet this vision. He expressed skepticism at Ellison’s continued pronouncements that SOA will enable Fusion to “easily connect to existing apps, even SAP.”
Bill is disappointed that more isn’t being said about the capabilities of Fusion HCM when it does arrive, and is even more than annoyed that Oracle is keeping everyone in the dark about it. He also says there has yet to be a clear migration path discussed for PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite customers.
He wasn’t all sour on the announcement, however — he’s glad to see Larry Ellison talked up the emerging Talent Management application that will be part of Fusion.
Additional note: The latest version of PeopleSoft Enterprise (9.1) was launched September 30. Paco Aubrejuan, Oracle vice president and general manager of PeopleSoft, will be holding a Webcast on October 28, 11:00 a.m. Pacific to discuss the latest release. (Register here.)
October 19th, 2009
Should SOA services be 'resalable,' versus 'reusable'?
There’s been a hubub going on for years now on whether ‘reuse’ is a valid value proposition for service oriented architecture. Maybe reuse is simply the wrong word.
Luca Cutolo, the galloping SOA gourmet, recently posted a business-focused perspective on SOA that faults the lack of “vision” in many SOA efforts, and makes the following point:
“SOA means mainly to do things in a re-sell-able way. Service orientation is a way to make re-use of components and features across the Enterprise and to sell them between departments, line of businesses or to customers by defining service level agreements (SLA).”
Maybe it’s time we threw out “reuse” as a term for describing SOA-based services, and started couching services in terms of “resale.” After all, it’s all about being able to sell capabilities to the business, and the business being willing to pay for them in some way (either through inter-departmental funding or direct purchase).
Look to the emerging cloud computing model, that introduces the rigors of the market to services, be they internal or external, for this vision. For example, SOA could be run as the foundation of an internal cloud business. ZDNet colleague Dion Hinchliffe, for one, recently proposed 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. Dion pointed out that 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?
Cloud computing also introduces more marketplace-enforced cost structures to the SOA ecosphere as well. In a panel discussion I hosted earlier in the summer, David Bressler raised the issue of cost structure, and how cloud — for better or worse — provides greater visibility into hidden costs that SOA does not address.
An enterprise customer is far more sensitive to the costs of external cloud services versus internally provided services. That’s because “the cloud providers will provide their services at a specific cost, that’s the actual cost plus whatever the margin may be,” Dave said. “Whereas, internal IT has always been kind of subsidized. If you need a project, you get internal IT to put it together for you, and delivered for you, and a lot of those costs either were hidden, and were dispersed across the enterprise. Cloud is forcing organizations to look at the actual cost of service delivery and perhaps the alignment more with what the market will be.”
This all makes sense, as companies are becoming both consumers and providers of services. Such service delivery occurs internally as well as outside of the corporate boundaries. By applying market-driven pricing inside and out, companies will see the true value of SOA and cloud formations.
October 15th, 2009
Oracle's Ellison: Fusion finally coming to fruition
I was at Oracle OpenWorld in rain-drenched San Francisco this week, but the clouds parted when it came time for CEO Larry Ellison’s finale keynote, in which he outlined the company’s Fusion Application strategy. (Unfortunately, however, I had to fly out before the Aerosmith concert at the event later that evening. As they would put it, “My get up and go must have got up and went…”)
Ellison announced that Oracle would be launching its ERP-focused Fusion Applications in 2010, and they will be deployable both on-premises and in the cloud. The cloud angle is somewhat ironic, since Ellison is known to be not too keen on cloud computing — he recently said, in fact, the concept has been co-opted by “venture capitalist ‘nitwits’ on Sand Hill Road.”
Fusion Applications, not to be confused too deeply with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g (which does form the foundational layer, however) is an integrated offering that will incorporate Oracle’s original and acquired software assets, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards. The Fusion Application suite will also include business intelligence and analytical capabilities that will be embedded with all components of the suite.
ZDNet colleague Sam Diaz provides great coverage of the Ellison keynote. My colleague Tony Baer, who has been following Oracle for some time, also provides some insightful perspectives on Oracle’s thinking via guest post at Dana Gardner’s ZDNet site. Tony talks about the SOA aspects of Fusion: “It uses SOA to loosely couple, rather than tightly integrate with other Fusion processes or processes exposed by existing back end applications, which should make Fusion apps more pliant and less prone to outage. That allows workflows in Fusion to be dynamic and flexible.”
October 15th, 2009
Conference alert: let's make SOA work for a living
Welcome to Service Oriented Architecture, Phase 2. It’s bigger, It’s badder, it’s all business. None of this namby-pamby JBOWs stuff. None of these SOAPY-REST tantrums. SOA is all grown up now, and it’s time it starts earning the bacon.
I am serving as conference chair and emcee for ebizQ’s upcoming “SOA in Action” virtual conference, scheduled for October 28th and 29th, and want to share some of highlights with you.
I will be joined by a number of leading industry figures in various sessions and panel discussions, including Forrester’s Randy Heffner, Software AG’s governance guru Miko Matsumura, Web Oriented Architecture guru Dion Hinchcliffe (also a rock star here at the ZDNet community), Gartner’s Yefim Natis, captain of the cloud Dave Linthicum, and US Department of Defense CIO Dan Risacher. The conference will be capped by a joint session featuring Gartner’s Roy Schulte and CalTech’s Mani Chandy.
Some author notes: Roy Schulte and Mani Chandy have just published a new work on event processing, Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies. Dave Linthicum has just published his latest book, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide.
Topics to be discussed include organizational and governance issues, “selling” SOA’s value to the business is more difficult in today’s economy, ROI, complex event processing, and cloud computing.
October 9th, 2009
Question: can packaged apps join the 'Lean IT' bandwagon?
Answer: It depends if you wear a ponytail.
Sandy Kemsley has been providing wall-to-wall coverage of the Forrester Business Technology Forum in Chicago, and picked up on an interesting panel discussion on the role of packaged applications in Lean IT. (Lean IT is the theme of Forrester’s confab.)
Sandy’s reports on Forrester BTF are a good read for anyone trying to get their heads around the concept of “Lean IT.” (She starts here with her series.) I mean, isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do for the past 20 years anyway? (Not that things have turned out that “Lean” yet. We’ll see if it works this time around.)
According to Sandy’s report, Forrester’s John Rymer argued that “packaged apps can never be Lean, since most are locked down, closed engines where the vendor controls the architecture, they’re expensive and difficult to upgrade, they use more functions than customers use, they provide a single general UI for all user personas, and each upgrade includes more crap that you don’t need.”
Chip Gliedman, a Forrester analyst, argued the opposite side, stating that the opposite of packaged apps — custom-grown apps — are just about as bloated and klunky as you can get. You need packaged apps to pave the way to Lean IT. Sandy quotes Chip as “pointing out that you just can’t build the level of functionality that a packaged application provides, and there can be data and integration issues once you abandon the wisdom of a single monolithic system that holds all your data and rules.”
I like Sandy’s summary of the whole thing: “Clearly, Gliedman is either insane or a secret plant from [insert large enterprise vendor name here], and Rymer is an incurable coder who probably has a ponytail tucked into his shirt collar. :) Nonetheless, an entertaining discussion.”
October 9th, 2009
Gartner: You want cloud? You need SOA first
In a new report, Gartner analyst Yefim Natis is quoted as saying that the success of cloud computing hinges on having good service oriented architecture underneath. “Prepare for the cloud by developing SOA skills,” Natis says. “The arrival of cloud as an option for the delivery of business applications could finally cement SOA into the IT mainstream,” he adds.
Natis urges enterprise IT shops to continue investing in service-oriented architecture skills and initiatives if they are to be able to take full advantage of the emergence of the cloud infrastructure. SOA may eventually become the standard way by which applications are accessed through a cloud service, he adds. This will also propel adoption of private clouds, contained with the firewall.
We’ve been banging the SOA-Cloud drum for years here at this blogspot (e.g., here in 2005; here, here, and here in 2007), and it’s good to see respected analysts also taking up the theme. SOA is evolving into the underlying enabler for private clouds, to the point where they almost can be considered one in the same. SOA has often been a tough sell. The good news is that the business readily grasps — and even likes — the idea of private and public clouds as a way to better organize and manage computing resources.
September 23rd, 2009
Cisco practices what it preaches, crosses boundaries with SOA
Cisco Systems apparently is doing a great job of practicing what it preaches when it comes to doing business over the network. The network systems provider — which promotes SOA and SONA (service oriented network architecture) — recently launched a “Commerce Transformation” initiative, based on SOA principles, that enabled the company to create a solid architectural and technology foundation for both existing and future application development. And the company is getting measurable results.
Cisco more than tripled transactions to $4 billion in a year via its SOA-based partner application
The initiative netted Cisco top honors as the most compelling case study for 2009, as determined in a competition held by the SOA Consortium and CIO Magazine. Brenda Michelson, a colleague over at ebizQ and a judge for the case study competition, provides a detailed description of the Cisco Systems SOA program.
The first project, the Partner Deal Registration (PDR) application, provided outside partners secure access to “Cisco pricing concessions and programs, leveraging reusable enterprise-class business services such as corporate pricing, configuration, and partner profiles that were coupled with flexible business rules for price lists, contractual discounts, and promotions, among others.”
Part of the challenge was bringing together more than 400 diverse applications based on various acquisitions, Brenda relates. “Consequently, several core business processes such as product ordering and pricing were becoming inconsistent, monolithic, complex, and inflexible to change. A lack of comprehensive end-to-end monitoring was also a concern.”
Benefits seen as a result of the program included improved process agility, productivity, detail tracking, and growth in the number of partners, deals, and bookings. “Six months after initial project rollout, the system had more than 9,000 partner users worldwide and had processed 37,000 deals worth $1.2 billion. Nearly a year later in June 2009, there were close to 20,000 partner users, and 56,000 deals worth $3.92 billion net had been processed.”
Cisco had a very comprehensive governance structure for its SOA, led by cross-functional councils comprising business and IT leaders were tasked with the planning and execution of an integrated capabilities roadmap, Brenda relates. Once the roadmap was finalized, an SOA project team consisting of an enterprise architecture team, business architects and IT architects evaluated the use of SOA. The EA team, which also acted as an SOA center of excellence, built a framework for the identification, creation, reuse, governance and monitoring of services and composite applications.
Brenda outlined some of the lessons learned. Some are well-accepted operating procedures across the industry, such as SOA governance, being about the business versus technology, and employing both a top-down and bottom-up approach becoming essential. Interestingly, one of the lessons is that business process management (BPM) needs to be part of the SOA equation. Also, the Cisco folks point out, “when you are a large company, most of the benefits will come from volume, so target simple things (services) with high volume.”
September 18th, 2009
Is cloud computing possible without SOA?
Is cloud computing possible without SOA?
Yes, but don’t expect things to move very smoothly.
Is SOA possible without cloud computing?
Of course. But don’t expect any impetus toward the loose coupling model you’re trying to promote.
I just listened to a podcast with Mike Kavis, CTO of M-Dot, who sat down with my colleague at ebizQ, Peter Schooff, to talk about SOA and the cloud and the advantages and difficulties enterprises face moving from SOA to the cloud.
Practicing SOA gives many companies a leg up when they start looking at cloud formations, Mike observes. First, he says, there’s the loosely coupled aspect of SOA — very important. “Companies who aren’t practicing service oriented architecture will be tightly coupled to their databases, will be tightly coupled to their infrastructure. So it’s very hard for them to move, or shift, or change things around,” he says. “Whereas companies with a service oriented architecture can look at their entire offering and say, ‘hey, these pieces make sense to move the cloud, these other pieces don’t,’ and they can make those moves. Without a service oriented architecture, it almost becomes an all or nothing proposition and that’s not a recipe for success.”
Mike establishes, then, that SOA is a big enabler for cloud computing. But at the same time, cloud computing is a big enabler for SOA. As Mike put it in the interview: “We all know that SOA has had its troubles catching on, and I think the movement to the cloud is one of the best things that could happen to SOA. Because what you’ll find is its very hard to move to the cloud when you’re tightly coupled to your architecture. And then I also see a lot more requirements for businesses to integrate with partners, to leverage mashups, to do those types of things, connect into other Software-as-a-Service providers.”
Mike did a great job of exploring the technical justification for SOA and cloud working together. Let me add there’s an enormous business justification for the SOA-cloud alliance as well. For years, IT has been fighting the tides trying to get business to understand what SOA is about, why it should be funded, and what the results will be. But business quickly gets cloud computing. The best way to sell SOA to the business is as an internal cloud program. Cloud finally makes SOA tangible to the business.
September 11th, 2009
Forrester's Randy Heffner: only one percent turned off by SOA so far
The problem with service oriented architecture is that people have been thinking about it too narrowly. Randy Heffner, VP and analyst with Forrester Research, says all too often, SOA has tended to be pigeonholed “as a technology, the next thing in line after objects, and components; and all about reuse and just about connecting between applications on the wire.
View SOA from a business design, not technology perspective
“These are all very small ways to view SOA,” he feels. “What’s much more important is to view it from a design perspective.”
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Randy in a podcast (MP3 link here) hosted over at ebizQ site. Among other things, Randy talked about a report Forrester issued last spring in the wake of Anne Thomas Manes’ “SOA is Dead” proclamation — titled, appropriately enough, “SOA is Far From Dead, But It Should Be Buried.”
What struck me was the fact that once an organization gets going with SOA, it will tend to stick with it for the long haul. In fact, as Forrester’s statistics bear out, only a minute fraction will give up and walk away from SOA altogether. “There’s a group of folks that struggle, but most importantly, there’s only about one percent of SOA users who say, it’s provided little or no benefit and we’re cutting back,” Randy says.
In fact, Forrester’s study uncovered deep and wide support for SOA, Randy says. “The data shows that SOA is very much alive and well and very much adding value,” he explains. “Not perfectly in the sense that there are still folks that struggle, because SOA is not an easy thing. But I think a lot of the struggling with SOA comes from …is some of the misguided ways that people view SOA.” As noted above, the misguided thinking is too-narrow thinking about what SOA can accomplish.
“By the end of this year, 75% of the global 2000, that’s folks with 20,000 or more employees, say that they’ll be using SOA,” Randy continues. “When we asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’ roughly 25% says that SOA has provided most or all of the benefits that they expected. There’s another 30 to 40% that said, ‘It’s provided less than we expected, but still enough benefit that we’re expanding our use of SOA.’”
What do the 25% moving full force into SOA have in common? “They’re treating SOA as a business-design concept,” Randy says. “That sets a whole different perspective on how you view the kinds of services that you’re building, the methods that you put around it.”
An element of the business-design view of SOA that doesn’t get enough attention, Randy feels, is service portfolio management, which is an important piece of governance. “A lot of folks say ‘SOA is all about a service library, just let projects create what services they need to, and drop them in a library, and then people can search, discover something that’s there that they might be able to use.’ Well, that’s a very haphazard kind of way to go about your business.”
Instead, approaching SOA through service portfolio management emphasizes services created to address business capabilities. “You know what business you’re in. You should be creating a coherent portfolio of business capabilities that are embodied in your SOA services. And, hence, service portfolio management is a much stronger approach to building a collection of services than a service library approach.”
Listen to or download the 11:54 podcast below:
Check out the full transcript of the podcast interview.
August 27th, 2009
Cloud: the SOA we always wanted, but never had?
Is cloud computing — in which services are produced and consumed across entities — paving the way for a massive wave of service oriented architecture adoption across businesses?
‘Cloud is SOA done right’
I recently had the opportunity to join a lively panel discussion led by Phil Wainewright to ruminate over this question, and we came to a general conclusion that cloud, indeed, is making SOA an easier sell to businesses. The consensus seemed to be that cloud is helping to boost the advantages promised by service orientation to a firmer business footing.
Phil and I were joined by David Bressler, principal architect with Progress Software, and Ed Horst, vice president of product strategy for AmberPoint. (Listen to the 45-minute interactive panel discussion here, read the full transcript here.)
I know many of you will correctly point out that cloud and SOA are different entities, with SOA focusing on the architecture and cloud on delivery of services. But consider the ways cloud is turbo-charging SOA. In some cases, SOA proponents have been struggling for years to get things moving in the right direction, and cloud is providing some new oomph and vitality to the effort:
- Cloud (as SOA should be) is well understand, and often demanded, by the business
- Cloud (as SOA should be) is platform, language, and technology agnostic
- Cloud (as SOA should) provides greater visibility and transparency to actual IT costs
- Cloud (as SOA should) necessitates binding contracts between service providers and consumers
- Cloud (as SOA should be) is based on trust between service providers and consumers
- Cloud (as SOA should) originates from business requirements
As Phil — who has been tracking developments in this space since launching LooselyCoupled.com almost a decade ago — put it, “Cloud is SOA done right.”
The panel kicked off with a discussion of the advantages cloud brings to the table, including service functionality across firewalls, more rapid delivery of information technology, and greater opportunities for integration. However, Phil pondered whether these are all the benefits that SOA was supposed to deliver.
Dave observed that cloud enables these advantages “through a way that allows you to use external providers to jump start that. “By doing that, it becomes much more component driven.” Plus, actual costs of business and IT services are more visible. Often, he added, a lot of infrastructure inside the enterprise “is discounted because there’s no clear or immediate benefit.”
Both SOA and cloud “have the same benefits because they both are essentially — fundamentally, architecturally, the same thing,” Dave continued. “But that’s where SOA leaves it — as an architecture. Cloud is about external providers providing services and wrapping those things — including the contract, the SLA — and then delivering that to different constituents.”
I pointed out that the ramp-up to SOA provided some foundation for the cloud experience, since “one of the big issues that many companies had to come to terms with in SOA is the establishing service level agreements, because they necessarily didn’t know where the service was originating — from another part of the enterprise, or crossing the firewall.” reliability and scalability also needed to be guaranteed.
Ed noted, however, that whether its SOA or cloud, enterprise service consumers do typically have a handle on who is providing the service. “In a lot of the customer examples that we have — telco, healthcare, those kinds of things — they’re still interacting with a well-known group of users,” he pointed out. “It’s not random, you-don’t-know-who-you’re-interacting-with kind of situation.”
There are also lessons to be drawn from the SOA experience that can be applied to cloud computing as well, Ed said. For one, “start with a specific project that has some kind of reasonable boundaries to it, that’s going to have daily business impact when it’s done. You want something that has regular use.” Also, Ed advised, “avoid the “boil-the-ocean architecture approach where we’re going to get everything to be cloud before we really do anything in cloud — we’ve seen that in SOA.” He recounted how one company developed a 72-page book of specifications, looking at every possible policy consideration, before they even started working with an SOA methodology. “Those boil-the-ocean approaches probably fail more often than they succeed,” he said.
The best approach for SOA — and now for cloud — is more of a hybrid strategy that focuses on specific projects, but employs a broad-brush architectural approach. “One of the more successful strategies I’ve seen is kind of a hybrid of kind of broad strokes as to where the overall architecture is going, where we really want to end up in two, or three, or four, or five years even — but with some real practical realities around that initial project.” Also, another lesson from SOA: “Govern early and often. You don’t usually regret having done that early on — but you oftentimes regret not having done it if you don’t.”
I added this thought to the conversation: if one was to be attending a conference ten years from now, “you will see that cloud did change the way we look at SOA and for a couple of reasons.” First, through cloud computing, the business gained a better understanding of service orientation. “If you want to sell SOA to the business, pitch it as cloud.”
Dave also raised the issue of cost structure, and how cloud — for better or worse — provides greater visibility into hidden costs that SOA does not address.
He illustrated the point this way:
“You and I are working in the same company. You have a service, I’m using that, we shake hands. ‘Phil, throw an extra server in there because I’m going to add some capacity. How much capacity? I don’t know yet. Okay, let’s go play golf.’ But now, I’m paying you to do the same thing as a cloud provider and I’m going to look at the bill. ‘Ooh, how come there are two servers on the bill?’ You might then go to your team say, ‘find another service somewhere and put it in.’”
The cloud providers will provide their services at a specific cost, that’s the actual cost plus whatever the margin may be. Whereas, internal IT has always been kind of subsidized. If you need a project, you get internal IT to put it together for you, and delivered for you, and a lot of those costs either were hidden, and were dispersed across the enterprise. Cloud is forcing organizations to look at the actual cost of service delivery and perhaps the alignment more with what the market will be.
August 13th, 2009
Private cloud formations rising, but remember SOA lessons
We’ve been tracking developments in the private cloud space for the past couple of years. As noted in my last post, there’s plenty of concern about the security and reliability of cloud computing.
Perhaps one way to address these concerns is through private clouds that remain in the confines of the enterprise.
A survey just released by Evans Data shows that there’s lots of interest in “private” cloud” development among software developers. In fact half of the 500 developers questioned said they expect to deploy apps in a private cloud environment sometime over the coming year. About 30% are currently working on applications destined for a private cloud environment, while an additional 19% expect to enter development within the next 12 months.
In addition, Java appears to be the language of choice for cloud formations. The largest group of developers (48%) think that Java is the best language for developing in the cloud - followed by C#.
There’s plenty of concern about security and reliability, however. Three-quarters of developers think that data for applications deployed in the cloud should be backed up outside the public cloud - either in traditional onsite storage or in a private cloud. (Disclosure: I have authored a number of survey reports for Evans Data, but not this one.)
But are we rushing too quickly into private clouds? Gartner analyst Tom Bittman warns that IT professionals building private clouds may be making the same mistakes as with SOA — that is, putting technology ahead of business requirements. He advised against building a cloud “and hoping they wil come.” As he puts it in a new post: “We’ve got to get our IT people to stop thinking about products and technologies and even architectures first, and instead to focus on understanding their service requirements first.”
“Start by understanding your service catalog (most organizations don’t have one), understand the SLAs and costs for each service (most don’t know that, either), build strategic plans for each of those services (does anyone have this?), determine which ones might go to the cloud in the future and when that cloud service will be “ready” (OK, this takes some work), make your ROI decision about building a private cloud service, and then you can start looking at architectures and products and technologies.”
Sound familiar? Anyone who has worked to introduce SOA methodologies into their organization will recognize the challenges Tom outlines.
ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner also just posted a panel discussion on cloud security issues, held at the recent Open Group conference.
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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