Category: Business ROI
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 16th, 2009
SOA helps Coast Guard navigate new tides of homeland security
Did you know the movement of any ship headed toward US waters is tracked by an SOA-aware service running on the US Coast Guard’s systems? And that SOA services are being employed to provide data to an international registry of maritime activity? And there is also an SOA service keeping track of the all the spare parts, equipment, and other assets the Coast Guard maintains? 
The Coast Guard already has close to 25 services that are either already or about to go into production as part of its growing SOA initiative – and more are planned. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives.
The Coast Guard – part of the US Department of Homeland Security – started looking at SOA in early 2007, as a way to address growing requirements to be able to share information not only across its own various units, but with federal, local and international agencies concerned with keeping an eye on vessels entering and leaving US shores. “We had the same conundrum of silos of excellence that many IT organizations have – IT systems tailored in stovepipes within lines of business,” says Munson.
Prior to its SOA implementation, the Coast Guard relied on slower and more manual methods of data sharing with its port partners. “It would either be some form of composed file that would be potentially handed over, or many times, a hard-copy printout or phone call,” Munson relates. In addition, sharing data with its fast-moving cutter fleet was also a challenge. “The cutters get underway and go where they’re needed, so we have fairly low-bandwidth connectivity to these kinds of assets at best,” Munson says. “So were also looking at not only data sharing, but also if there’s a better way with emerging technology to help address some of the problems of being able to use our systems with deployed assets.”
To address these requirements, the Coast Guard implemented an enterprise service bus-centered SOA that enabled asynchronous messaging from Fiorano Software Technologies. The solution was employed in the Coast Guard’s Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT) system, which at any given time, is tracking up to 6,000 vessels moving toward or in US waters as well as vessels anywhere else in the world. LRIT tracks signals emitted from vessels every six hours. “That information is running entirely on the Coast Guard’s SOA framework in production,” says Munson. As a result, the Coast Guard SOA requires extremely high-volume services, “processing thousands of messages per second.”
A second system, the Nationwide Automated Identification System (NAIS), relies on a second transponder on ships exceeding 300,000 gross tons, broadcasting navigational information for ships of 300 gross tons or more at three-second intervals. These broadcasts from US territorial waters result in about 2,000 messages per second received in the NAIS system. The Coast Guard is currently protoyping various data services around this system for maritime domain awareness, Munson says.
This is the first of a three-part series. Next post: How the Coast Guard built organizational support for SOA.
November 14th, 2009
IT project risk aversion 101
Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder picked up on my latest post on the lack of measurable results for IT, and posits as to where the greatest IT project risk may be found:
November 13th, 2009
Data services may help address a major SOA unknown -- data quality
A couple of months ago, as reported here, Neal Fishman released a book that warned of SOA-based infrastructures helping to spread “epidemics” of viral data across enterprises — since data can be pulled from multiple, formerly siloed sources and quickly distributed across service-oriented systems and applications.
How much data pulled from multiple sources is bad data?
Informatica’s Ash Parikh, a long-time advocate of the data services approach to SOA, has also been warning of this scenario. I have gotten to know Ash through our participation on the Informatica Perspectives site, and recently had a chance to talk to him and Informatica’s Chris Boorman prior to the launch of Informatica 9, which embraces the SOA data services concept.
Ash proposes that organizations adopt a data services layer that provides “a model and standards-based reusable data abstraction layer that can make holistic, accurate and timely information available to an enterprise integration infrastructure, without all the typical complexity and maintenance costs.” He defines a data service as “a modular, reusable, business-relevant service that enables the access, integration, and delivery of complex enterprise data throughout the enterprise and across corporate firewalls in batch, near real-time and real-time modes, including federation.”
As companies move into the next level of SOA maturity, in which services start reaching across enterprise boundaries, many have been struggling to improve SOA’s ability to deliver business value. One factor is companies can’t trust the data that is being pulled in from all the stovepipes into enterprise services. SOA, as Chris puts it, “has lacked the data abstraction layer that enables organizations to basically define the data objects and the rules associated with data objects, that can then be permeated through — whether it be Web services or SQL or batch or anything else — to the applications that are using that data.”
Ash, who has been warning the industry about the quality of data — or lack thereof — surging through SOA-based infrastructures for some time now, says SOA data services open up many new avenues for connecting SOA with enterprise data management. “It’s much more than just data access,” he points out. “It’s making sure the data that is delivered is of the greatest quality.”
SOA data services also helps create a more collaborative environment between IT, data managers, and business data owners. In the real world, Ash says, “when people talk about data, they never talk about ‘data source X’ or ‘data source Y’ that’s sitting in a corner somewhere,” he says. “They report the data as a business representation of data — my customer data, my product data, things like that” This brings things in line with the perspective required of SOA architects, who need to better assure more timely and accurate and consistent views of their data and the product data.
Given this backdrop, I saw that Mike Kavis also has been doing work in this area, and just posted a business case for data services at his site. He describes the issues that can be rectified via an abstracted data layer: real time failover among multiple virtual data centers; managing multi-channel partners with multiple data structures; regulations and laws affecting data management and movement; and data security against direct access to databases.
Maintaining a loosely coupled data services layer takes away the complexities and inconsistencies of attempting to manage multiple data sources. “By abstracting the data layer and creating configurable services as access points to the data, teams can quickly implement solutions in a controlled and standardized manner,” Mike says. For example, they can move quickly “due to the simplicity of the data access and the fact that they don’t need extensive knowledge of the underlying data.”
Ash Parikh also talks about the divide between data management and real-life business needs, something that SOA and data services can help address. For example, he observes, many companies have built great data models, but these models tend to be static. “It’s great to have a model, but I also need a way to find all that information, and to make sure that information I’m finding across a multitude of these data sources – which can be varied in structures and formats — is relevant to me.” Many of these issues can be resolved at the data services abstraction layer, he says.
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 11th, 2009
Why IT can't seem to deliver measurable productivity
Are your investments in IT bearing measurable results? Or are the benefits more “feels-right” types of results? Perhaps IT can’t deliver measurable productivity because the measurements are wrong.
Perhaps IT can’t deliver measurable productivity because the measurements are wrong
Every time I’ve spoken to a CIO and IT manager over the past decade, one question I always ask is if he or she has been able to measure the results of programs, be it service oriented architecture, CRM, Web-to-host, what have you. And, I have to admit, I rarely hear measurable numbers — it’s usually anecdotal evidence, such as speedier processing, or positive end-user or customer feedback.
Don’t blame the CIOs, though — it’s just that the benefits of IT are inherently difficult to quantify at any high level. In this vein, Janne Korhonen just published an interesting piece over at ebizQ, explaining why it’s so hard to measure the productivity impact of information technology.
Janne quotes MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, who in 1993 published a landmark paper on why the productivity impacts of IT is so hard to measure: 1) measurement error due to use of conventional productivity-measurement approaches; 2) time lags in IT payoffs; 3) localized optimization; and 4) lack of explicit measures of the value of information.
We don’t seem to have come too far in the 16 years since Brynjolfsson published that analysis — at least in Janne’s opinion. He delves into Brynjolfsson’s four challenges in some detail. For example, he notes that when it comes to measurement errors — caused by outmoded ideas about constitutes productivity — he calls for “rigorous new means to measure IT productivity and output are needed to account for IT’s role in innovation and new value creation, commensurable with IT-enabled efficiency.” IT’s contribution to “operational improvements, new capabilities, new products and new markets” — long underestimated — is a good place to start.
As discussed here at this blogsite, there are benefits and gains that are either tough to capture, or tough to tie directly back to a particular IT initiative. “Business agility” is a classic example — how do you measure business agility? This is the benefit touted for service oriented architecture — how much agility is being delivered by an SOA initiative, versus other systems? The businesses at the forefront of SOA tend to be at the forefront of other advanced management practices as well.
Then there’s the whole matter of oversell, companies pouring money into IT products and services that may be, on the whole, unnecessary or overkill. Or worse yet, end up as shelfware. You don’t need to be a productivity expert to see the waste there. So you have the combined storm of hundred of thousands of dollars being spent on something for results that, if measured, will be measured against archaic productivity standards. Will cloud breath clarity into this confusion? Probably not.
It should be noted that Brynjolfsson hasn’t been entirely pessimistic on the ability of IT to deliver business success since that 1993 paper. More recently, he and MIT’s Andrew McAfee published data that shows IT making a big difference at a macro level. They observed that industries that made the greatest investments in IT during the 1990s have become the most competitive. “On average,” they said, “the whole U.S. economy has become more ‘Schumpeterian’ since the mid-1990s. [Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" in 1942] What’s more, these changes have been greatest in the industries that buy the most software and computer hardware.”
Again, it’s more than pouring money into products. McAfee and Brynjolfsson state that even with a lot of IT, “both innovation and replication require a combination of leadership and insight from executives. Take innovation: Many companies use IT to capture huge amounts of data from their operations, but relatively few have been able to use this data creatively.”
And it takes perceptive management to identify the technology solutions that will make a difference, and be able to effectively measure the impact of those solutions. As Janne put it:
“Not all IT projects are productive. They may even be detrimental to the business, but misaligned incentive schemes and other structures sustain non-optimal IT decision-making with predominantly short-term planning horizon and focus on operational and cost efficiency. IT investments should be judged by their overall bottom line impact, including not only cost reductions and efficiency gains but also the indirect impact that IT has on increasing business effectiveness.”
The bottom line is that there has never been an expectation that IT would be solely responsible for a company’s rise or fall. Adroit management, supported by the right IT tools, makes the difference. A company that smartly and innovatively leverages its IT in new and creative ways will move to the head of the pack. And, thanks to IT, you don’t need a workforce of thousands to do so. And we need to measure these changes in more holistic ways.
November 9th, 2009
Enterprise mashup, defined
Kudos to JackBe’s
You may recall that last spring, following a TV news interview, Luis was not happy with the explanation he gave to describe enterprise mashups. JackBe sponsored a couple of contests, along with a lot of discussion among practitioners and analysts.
Here, at last, is the working definition Luis and his team have arrived at:
“Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich Web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.”
Wait — that’s not all. The JackBe crew also sought to answer the question of “why” people need enterprise mashups. They didn’t want enterprise mashups to be solutions in search of problems, as has been the case with many a technology initiative:
“Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Enterprise mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand.”
And finally, the JackBe crew also addressed the “how” aspect — as in how enterprise mashups can be created:
“An enterprise mashup platform is a technology suite that enables the rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation of Enterprise mashups without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects.”
In this last passage, the user-created aspect of enterprise mashups are included in the definition. This is where mashups can potentially deliver business benefits, as more flexibility can be put into users’ hands. And, as the “why” part of this definition shows, enterprise mashups put decision makers in touch with performance data from across the organization. The greatest challenge to delivery of information at this time is the time it takes to prepare and deliver reports. Let’s give end-users the tools to quickly and configure their interfaces to back-end enterprise applications and data.
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...]
October 26th, 2009
Survey: cloud interest grows triple-fold; cost may not be main factor
Everyone figures that companies are buying into cloud to save money. A new survey says otherwise. But why are companies adopting cloud?
A new study (PDF link) commissioned by Avanade shows a 320% increase over the past nine months in respondents reporting that they are testing or planning to implement cloud computing. Avanade claims this is the first time a survey has documented a global embrace of cloud computing in the enterprise.
The study also found that while companies are moving toward cloud computing, there is little support for cloud-only models (just five percent of respondents utilize only cloud computing). Rather, most companies are using a combination of cloud and internally owned systems, or hybrid approach.
Okay, the survey confirms what we’ve been seeing anecdotally. That is, there’s been a huge uptick in cloud interest. And apparently, this has been taking place during an economic downturn. But here’s where it gets interesting: Only 13% said the onset of a tougher economy helped push them toward the cloud. A majority, 58%, say economic conditions had nothing to do with it.
While Avanade didn’t seem to read anything into this, another observer, Paul Miller, thought this finding was a real eye-opener, suggesting that contrary to what everyone assumes, cloud computing decisions are not being driven by cost-cutting needs:
“Also interesting was the relatively small impact of the economic situation upon Cloud adoption, with only 13% suggesting it had ‘helped’ adoption plans and 58% reporting ‘no effect.’ In my conversations with Nick Carr and others, there’s been an underlying presumption (on my part, as well as theirs) that cost-saving arguments with respect to Cloud Computing would prove persuasive and compelling. It would appear not. This would suggest, of course, that enterprise adopters are taking to the Cloud for reasons other than the budget sheet…”
If it isn’t its low entry costs, then why is cloud computing so popular? Avanade says half of the companies surveyed that have migrated to cloud computing technologies use it to “manage and deliver business applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources (HR) services.” Forty‐six percent of respondents are also using cloud computing for data storage.
Speaking of greater flexibility and agility, the Avanade survey suggests that the service model is taking over as the prevailing IT value proposition. As Avanade puts it, the “online services model is beginning to fundamentally change how IT services are consumed and provisioned in large organizations. More than half of respondents report that they are currently using Software as a Service applications. In the United States, that number increases to more than two-thirds (68 percent).”
And many of these deployments are internal cloud. Avanade says that globally, “there is a 2:1 ratio of respondents who prefer SaaS delivered internally (or as private services) versus from third-party service providers. There is an even greater dissparity in the United States, with a 4:1 ratio in favor of internal SaaS deployments.”
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 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 12th, 2009
'Lean IT': another buzzphrase for something we've been trying to do all along?
Customer in a restaurant: Waiter, bring me a steak, and make it lean.
Waiter: Okay, sir. Which way?
As reported in my last post, Sandy Kemsley has done a great job of covering Forrester’s Business Technology Forum, which focused on Lean IT.
But which way is IT supposed to lean? Alas, it seems Forrester is helping to heap another buzzphrase on the world that seems to describe things that have already been in motion for years. (Some say this is the case with service oriented architecture as well, by the way.)
What, exactly, is ‘Lean IT’? Wikipedia’s definition of Lean IT is vague and convoluted:
“Lean IT is the extension of lean principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service.”
Yeah, so? Again, haven’t organizations been battling waste in IT since day one?
I don’t know who coined the phrase “Lean IT,” but it takes a page from “Lean Manufacturing,” which tightened up that sector in the 1980s and 1990s to survive the onslaught from more efficient and quality-driven overseas competition. Noah B. Kindler, Vasantha Krishnakanthan, and Ranjit Tinaikar of McKinsey & Company discussed the concept back in May 2007, claiming that application development and maintenance (ADM) productivity can be boosted up to 40% by eliminating waste from routine processes. “Application development and maintenance is a prime candidate for lean methods not only because it involves a great many processes with the potential to be optimized but also because large differences in productivity among organizations suggest that some are far less efficient than others,” they said. As they put it:
“Each category of waste in manufacturing has a counterpart in ADM, which can be thought of as a kind of factory that develops new applications according to business requirements. Changes to an application’s requirements are one common source of ADM waste, causing many of the classic varieties identified in lean: designers rework their specifications, coders wait for specifications to stabilize, testers overproduce as their testing environments have to be set up repeatedly, unmet requirements pile up in a large backlog. As in manufacturing, systematically eliminating these sources of waste improves the delivery time, quality, and efficiency of the ADM end product.”
So they equate IT operations with a manufacturing process. Which makes sense, and is something we’ve discussed in this blogsite before (here, here, and here). By introducing assembly-line processes and greater automation to software development, we can definitely tighten up the process.
In past posts, I quoted IBM’s Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Microsoft’s Jack Greenfield, both who said we were at the dawn of a new era of IT — “industrialization.” Wladawsky-Berger said that IT-delivered services are starting to become more componentized, standardized, and mass-consumable across the spectrum, just as manufactured goods were a century ago. Greenfield talked about the concept of the “software factory,” defined as “a development environment configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application. While software factories are really just the logical next step in the continuing evolution of software development methods and practices… introducing patterns of industrialization.”
He said, however, that “our IT infrastructures are nowhere near ready to handle this explosive growth of information and service. Much of IT, - including applications, data centers, systems management, and so on, - is way too ad-hoc and custom designed, sort of like manufacturing was decades ago….”
So, is Lean IT the right thing at the right time to seize upon this impending industrial revolution of IT services? The McKinsey authors identify the following areas for “waste reduction” in software assembly: flow processing to reduce overcapacity or excess inventory; release schedules to help prioritize projects; staff and supplier workload balancing; greater standardization; segmentation of projects by complexity to route projects to the proper resources; and and by avoiding unnecessary overhead for simple tasks; and quality ownership that extends to all groups involved in software production — not just QA.
These are are well and good goals, and I’m sure every organization can benefit greatly by applying these principles to their IT operations. But is there anyone who hasn’t been already trying to move these efforts forward? What does Lean IT bring to the table? Consider everything that has been underway in recent years:
- Service oriented architecture: Formerly siloed applications are decomposed into reusable services that are made available across enterprises.
- Agile development: Developers work side by side in an iterative way with business users throughout the process.
- Virtualization: Physical IT systems and resources are abstracted into a software-based enterprise service layer.
- IT automation: Routine IT processes formerly handled manually are handled on a systematic basis by the software and machines themselves.
- Cloud computing/outsourcing: Non-critical IT tasks and applications are acquired from more specialized providers, mainly on a pay-per-use or contractual basis.
- Business process management: Business workloads are decomposed and automated.
- ITIL: Best practices and principles for IT services applied uniformly across organizations.
References I’ve been seeing to Lean IT seem quite provincial — optimizing IT processes at the ground level without bringing in the larger picture — the transformation of the business. Lean IT lacks the expansive thinking that Wladawsky-Berger and Greenfield have in mind for the coming industrial revolution in IT services.
And, again, it begs the question: what does Lean IT offer that we haven’t been trying to do already?
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.”
September 30th, 2009
Seven ways companies go wrong with SOA
Remember, SOA is a journey, not a quick overnight fix. It’s a transformative process that your organization will follow for the long run.
A few years back, I put together a list of where companies appeared to be steering in the wrong direction in terms of SOA implementations. The list bears repeating, because the issues still keep getting in the way of SOA success. Many companies run the risk of jumping into the approach without looking at where they are leaping. Here are the most common pitfalls that could tie an SOA installation into knots.
1) Viewing SOA as a global, enterprise-scale project involving the entire enterprise: An SOA need not be a galactic initiative that sucks up resources all across the enterprise. In fact, one of the beauties of SOA that it can start small and simple, deployed across a single business process. Definitions of SOA vary, but SOA can start with something as simple as some Web services that accomplish an end-to-end process, such as fulfilling a purchase order.
2) Looking to a single vendor to offer very complete SOA solutions: There’s no such thing as buying an SOA solution; there’s no such thing as SOA in a box, no matter what a vendor may tell you. SOA is not a product that a vendor can ship to you for installation over the weekend. Rather, SOA is a philosophy around developing your infrastructure using those vendor tools. If you have a J2EE or .NET Framework, you have a framework. An SOA is what you eventually do with those frameworks.
3) Assuming that SOA will automatically grow out of a primordial soup of Web services: Many companies think they have SOA when they actually have a JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services) architecture. Somehow, there’s an assumption out there that a spaghetti architecture of Web services will somehow evolve into something resembling a full-functioning SOA. Actually, it’s possible (but not advisable) to build an SOA-enabled infrastructure with no Web services at all. An organization could have 1,000 Web services, but unless these services work in concert to address specific end-to-end business processes, that does not an SOA make. One additional point about JBOWS, however — there’s nothing wrong with being in the JBOWS stage of evolution, because that’s what it is, a stage of the evolution. But don’t expect the full-fledged agility of SOA at this stage — that’s where the disappointment has crept in.
4) Build it, and they will come: SOA is not an illuminated ballpark in the middle of a cornfield that can be seen from miles around. No one will take advantage of an SOA-enabled infrastructure if they don’t know where to find it, or even if it exists. There’s a rule that if developers have to spend more than 10 minutes to find what they are looking for (and don’t find it), they will create it themselves. An SOA will never be of value if it’s confined to one silo of the organization, and its components are not made available and shared across business unit. An SOA service built, managed, and used by one business unit will cost just as much as any other legacy application.
5) Assuming that businesspeople don’t, or won’t, understand SOA: Actually, most people on the business side can intuitively grasp the potential savings and opportunities an SOA can bring. And Enterprise 2.0 and the cloud dynamic really drives the points about service orientation home on the business side. The potential of reusing services across various business units, versus paying developers to rebuild a new service in each instance, is Management and Finance 101. The difficult part is building and managing such an infrastructure, applying IT governance, monitoring, and management to ensure that services are kept up and running, are scalable, and perform well.
6) Assuming that IT people don’t, or won’t understand the business: It’s time to put this misconception, which has been weaving its way through conferences, articles, and analyst reports for years, to rest. Indeed, SOA needs to be a multi-disciplinary, cooperative effort between IT and other departments. However, IT is part of the business, and IT professionals’ paychecks are signed by the business. Most IT departments understand that they play a vital role in moving the business forward. However, inevitably, specs and priorities will change during the life of a project, and that’s why projects fail. It’s incumbent on both IT and business users to keep each other informed; both have a financial stake in the business’s success.
7) Treating SOA as something far superior to a mere mortal “project:” SOA success is delivered one project at a time. If you have been to any number of SOA conferences, or tuned into the multitude of SOA Webcasts, you probably have heard the message over and over again that “SOA is more than just another project.” Yes, true. SOA does represent a new way of thinking, and will transform your IT, and ultimately, your business processes. However, SOA still needs to be treated as a project, with the same deliberate planning of timelines, establishment of baselines, and measurement of key performance indicators as other large IT projects. SOA requires executive buy-in, it requires resources, and it requires proof that it is paying off.
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 21st, 2009
Cloud offers SOA apps a 'venue to stretch their legs'
“Cloud computing is already beginning to unleash the potential of SOA and much more is on the way.”
Cloud is the target platform SOA has been lacking until now
That’s the view of Gray Hall, a veteran of the IT hosting industry, in a recent post on the growing role of SOA in cloud formations. Gray states that SOA is an architectural pattern and cloud is a target platform for that pattern. The significance of cloud, he adds, is that SOA has languished since its inception, and the reason is because it has lacked a “target platform.” As he puts it:
“[It] is correct to call SOA an architectural pattern. [It] is correct to call cloud computing a ‘target platform.’ But the real news in this story is that a target platform is exactly what SOA has been lacking all these years. All applications must run somewhere; applications need infrastructure. SOA is an application architecture; cloud computing is an infrastructure architecture. It’s that simple. This marriage is long overdue.”
Gray says that cloud processing (dynamic allocation of CPU resources) and cloud storage (Web services API access to storage resources) infrastructure “is the most natural target platform for SOA apps because cloud infrastructure is designed to scale in the way implied by the SOA approach to application architecture.”
Cloud infrastructure services such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace have made SOA real to many companies, he says. “Until recently, where could a SOA app find a venue to stretch its legs?”
Gray has hit upon something here. SOA’s value is not seen within services built for a single silo, or even those shared between two or more silos. SOA begins to pay off as the result of a network effect — services built and consumed across a growing Web of providers and consumers. Cloud-based services are broadening organizations’ vistas as to when and where they can access services.
(Thanks to reader csarkar for the pointer to Gray’s post.)
September 21st, 2009
Twenty percent of SOA value from service reuse; where's the other 80%?
Is service reuse a worthy part of the SOA value equation? This is a question that has been endlessly debated in recent years.
Mashups may hold the key to long-term SOA value
For example, last month, we quoted Forbes’ Dan Woods, who argued that companies are focusing on building SOA-based services that will be available for reuse as soon as they are tested and released to the registry/repository. Perhaps, he says, we should worry less about reusability at the beginning phase of service development.
Or, even if reuse does deliver ROI, it may only have a limited reach. Marc Rix recently weighed in on the topic, suggesting out that “basing SOA on reuse only modernizes 20% of IT and, thus, does not yield agility.” The other 80% of the equation, he says, is based on deployment of data services.
He arrived at the 20% figure by calculating the fact that reusable services tend to be the most popular or mainstream services, and “tend to orbit around relatively static business data (employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, etc.).” Building and deploying these services means relatively immediate reuse, and therefore, ROI. However, there’s little ROI beyond the immediate rush, he says.
For SOA value, Marc says, look to the ” Long Tail of IT” — data taken out of core enterprise systems and manipulated by business users, in applications such as business intelligence and analytics. “This is where business is really conducted and this is where SOA is really needed,” he says.
Why I hear Marc saying is the real meat of SOA will be seen in more dynamic, user-created (or at least user specified) composite apps. Enterprise mashups come to mind in this context. In these situations, end users can create their own interfaces as business requirements demand. They can be quickly built and used. However, what is needed is a way to make this possible within a governed framework. With SOA governance and best practices applied on this end at the architectural level, organizations have assurance that these enterprise mashups are subject to the same security and vetting as core SOA services.
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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White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
- Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now
- Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
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- More from IBM
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- Can your business work smarter? Learn more about Lotus Symphony
- Learn how to work smarter and optimize cost using the IBM Smart SOA approach Download the eBook
- Smarter ways to make smarter products Read the brief from IBM
