Archive for: July, 2009
July 29th, 2009
SOA project with a billion-dollar price tag
For those of you debating whether to commit $75,000 here or $150,000 there for SOA-based projects, here’s some news to keep things in perspective. Bob Brewin over at NextGov reports that the service oriented architecture approach that the US Department of Defense intends to deploy to integrate the DoD’s health records with those of the Veteran’s Administration may run more than $1.2 billion.
It’s not clear from the 476-page appropriations document where and how this money will be spent, whether the bulk of it will go into consulting, services, software, or perhaps a humongous, see-all do-all Enterprise Service Bus. But the US government is apparently getting serious about SOA. But then again, a billion isn’t a whole lot in government circles.
July 29th, 2009
Point-counterpoint: Is SCA the limit?
There’s been a blogstorm swirling around Service Component Architecture (SCA), and Loraine Lawson has done a great job of summing up both sides of the discussion.
To sum up, there are two points of view on the efficacy of SCA:
Anti-SCA: “SCA is heavily being driven by the vendor community and SCA breaks many of the rules of SOA that have been touted by these same vendors for the past six years…. SCA is a step backwards in software engineering. It’s an abandonment of the SOA principles that have failed because of lack of investment in proper architecture toward a pure programming model driven by software engineers. Thus, the goal here is once again to allow poorly-designed systems to be built by software engineers with very little architecture experience so they can claim to have some attributes of SOA.” -JP Morgenthal
Pro-SCA: “SCA is a key new technology that will help people achieve… greater simplicity, better service design, higher productivity and less dependence on large software stacks. I hope anyone… interested in these goals takes the time to take a closer look at the technology.” - Michael Crowley, author of Understanding SCA: Revolutionize How You Build BPM Applications.
Loraine observes that organizations need to concentrate on business requirements, not tools — and nurturing the skills that can help meet those needs.
July 27th, 2009
SOA's 'blind spot' -- where's the timely and trusted data? (2)
Last week, I reported on Ash Parikh’s discussion on data being the missing link in SOA efforts. Companies are missing the effective establishment of data services that assure the information flowing through SOA-enabled applications is timely and accurate.
Dave Linthicum also zeros in on this challenge, observing that while plenty of smart people understand what SOA needs to do, the data focus is missing — “and that is killing SOA.” He notes that SOA and enterprise architects focus on the service definition, but don’t pay enough attention to the data within the architecture.
In any project, there needs to be coordination between the SOA side of the house and the enterprise data management side.
July 27th, 2009
The value of enterprise architecture in tough times: report from Open Group (2)
Is enterprise architecture the right strategy for tough economic times, or should organizations throw away the deliberative long-term planning to fight more immediate fires?
Here are more dispatches from John Meyer of The Open Group, reporting on the group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, held last week in Toronto. Highlights from day two are summarized below. Day one is summarized in my previous post.
David Foote, founder and CEO of Foote Partners, LLC, said two diverging opinions dominate the discussion about the value of enterprise architects in an economic recession. One says architects are poorly suited to emergency situations where return on investment hurdles are primary directives, and another opinion argues that continued investment in architecture skills is critical during chaotic cycles. This session examined these positions and the current state of the architecture profession, drawing from Foote Partners rigorous proprietary trends research involving more than 1,900 US and Canadian employers, plus salary and skills/certifications pay benchmark surveys covering 87,000 IT professionals.
According to Foote’s study, those architecture skills that have shown the most demand based on compensation growth over the last year include project management, business process management, infrastructure architecture, business analysis, and ITIL. Read the rest of this entry »
July 23rd, 2009
Enterprise architecture heads north: report from Open Group
John Meyer of The Open Group sent some detailed dispatches from the group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, being held this week in Toronto. Thanks to John for a great job summarizing many of the key insights coming from the conference — some highlights from day one are summarized below:
Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, kicked off the conference with a keynote address about his organization’s use of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). Brown began his presentation with an overview of the key business drivers for embracing TOGAF, and the unique challenges experienced along the way by small organizations that lack the resources to hire an enterprise architect or purchase the standard implementation tools. In addition, Brown illustrated how The Open Group has incorporated the Operating Model from the book, “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” and how they also used OMG’s UML.
Following Brown’s keynote, Alain Perry, Treasury Board Secretariat, Chief Information Officer Branch for the Canadaian government, delivered a presentation on the collaborative nature of the Canadian Government’s EA program, which spans 130 different agencies and 350,000 people. Perry provided a comprehensive overview of the Canadian Government’s Reference Model for enterprise architecture, which he and his team are building as the basis for EA throughout the entire country. Read the rest of this entry »
July 22nd, 2009
SOA's 'blind spot' -- where's the timely and trusted data?
My colleague Ash Parikh reports he has done a measure of “soul searching” — which included a lot of discussions with experts and practitioners — about service oriented architecture, and has come to the conclusion that much of the world is operating under a couple of misconceptions about SOA.
Incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate data torpedoes SOA
SOA “guarantees” business agility: Not necessarily, Ash says. “Applications and business processes require timely and accurate information, but SOA often overlooks or worse yet, simply assumes this requirement.”
SOA does “not” need to include a data integration layer: Traditional technology underpinnings of SOA such as EAI and ESB attempt to address data integration, “but in many cases cannot efficiently deal with data volumes and latencies.”
Actually, Ash has been talking for some time about these missing links in SOA efforts. Companies are missing the Read the rest of this entry »
July 21st, 2009
SOA, cloud: it's the architecture that matters
For success in deploying cloud services, look no further than what we’ve already done with service oriented architecture.
For success in deploying cloud services, look no further than SOA
I recently had the chance to join Dave Linthicum and Ed Horst in a scintillating ebizQ Webcast on managing cloud-based services and transactions. The message is that the lessons we’ve learned these past several years from SOA can be readily applied to emerging cloud formations.
Many have been debating whether cloud computing will replace or supplant service oriented architecture. Dave says this is not the case, as SOA and cloud are part of the same package. The key to success, he says, is to stay focused on enterprise architecture.
Cloud formations require the same enterprise architecture and governance — encompassing technology, people, and processes — that companies are now putting into place to manage SOA. “To make sure you’re leveraging cloud computing properly in the context of your architecture you need to have a governance strategy,” Dave relates. “You need to manage those services within a context of a larger enterprise. This is probably one of the most important aspects of service oriented architecture and one of the most important aspects of cloud computing as well. Because if you do not have a strong governance approach and governance strategy, then you’re not going to be successful.”
Cloud computing ultimately made possible by SOA, says Dave, who is also author of soon-to-be-published book on the topic, titled Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide. “SOA and cloud computing are related one to the other,” he relates. “Service oriented architecture is all about sharing services and sharing information, processes, and agility integration and governance. And cloud computing is all about providing architectural options, such as software as a service, database on service, and platform on demand.”
In both cases, the name of the game is agility, he explains. “The value proposition of service oriented architecture versus traditional architectural approaches is the ability to take advantage of agility. Since we address everything as services, we’re able to configure and reconfigure those services, either in composite applications, such as mashups, or binding them into processes, or abstracting them into applications.”
The “loosely coupled” aspect of SOA is an important ingredient for cloud implementations as well. The best scenarios for moving services to the cloud is “typically when applications and processes and data are more loosely coupled and less dependent on each other,” he states.
Cloud computing provides new architectural options in the way services are deployed, Dave relates. “So instead of just looking at complete on-premise solutions, where we were binding and placing systems and services just within our data centers, we have architectural options such as Amazon and 3tera.”
July 21st, 2009
SOA security issues best addressed by empowered service consumers
Dr. Chris Harding, a thought leader behind The Open Group who I’ve enjoyed working with from time to time, wonders whether we’ve been looking at the SOA security problem “the wrong way around.” In a guest post over at Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect site, Chris suggests SOA and the use of shared services may actually solve more security problems than it creates.
SOA solves more security problems than it creates
Certainly, sharing services across domains or between enterprises creates additional layers of security requirements, and it is right to worry about it. But, Chris observes that “these problems are due, not to the use of services, but to the use of distributed software modules with multiple owners.”
The best way to address security issues that result from sharing services that cross domains is by being empowered consumers of these services, Chris says. He says service consumers should be asking the right questions, such as the following:
- What services am I using?
- Who provides them?
- What level of security are they contracted to provide?
- How far do I believe that they can and will meet their contractual obligation?
As Chris points out, the beauty of a service-oriented approach is that it provides for common mechanisms — security services — that can be developed and tested and applied against many types of applications or scenarios. Individual domain or application owners no longer need to reinvent the wheel, rely on jury-rigged approaches, or cross their fingers if common SOA-based security is available within the enterprise to secure their application and data assets. With such services, we will truly have empowered consumers.
July 20th, 2009
Avoid accidental complexity, and 96 other things every software architect should know
Favor simplicity. Avoid accidental complexity. Don’t worry about building the ‘perfect’ beast. Don’t worry about future-proofing. Treat people with respect.
These common-sense pearls of wisdom come from a book titled 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, edited by Richard Monson-Haefel, that is packed with truisms by dozens of authorities for managing technology solutions in the context of today’s business environments. Thanks to David Chappell (.NET guru) for surfacing this book, originally published last summer, on his must-read list.
Here are 10 select gems pulled from the list of 97:
Chances are your biggest problem isn’t technical (by Mark Ramm): “Mere familiarity with the conversation as a technology isn’t enough. Learning to treat people with respect, and learning give them the benefit of the doubt, is one of the core skills that turn a smart architect into an effective architect.”
Don’t put your resume ahead of the requirements (by Nitin Borwankar): “Always put the customer’s long-term needs ahead of your own short term needs and you won’t go wrong.”
Simplify essential complexity; diminish accidental complexity (by Neal Ford): “Prefer frameworks derived from working code rather than ones cast down from ivory towers. Look at the percentage of code you have in a solution that directly addresses the business problem vs. code that merely services the boundary between the application and the users. Cast a wary eye on vendor-driven solutions… vendors often push accidental complexity. Make sure that the solution fits the problem.”
Simplicity before generality, use before reuse (by Kevlin Henney): “Favoring simplicity before generality acts as a tiebreaker between otherwise equally viable design alternatives. When there are two possible solutions, favor the one that is simpler and based on concrete need rather than the more intricate one that boasts of generality.”
Reuse is about people and education, not just architecture (by Jeremy Meyer): “If your team doesn’t know where to find reusable artifacts or how to reuse them they will default to the natural, human position: they will build it themselves. And you will pay for it.”
Control the data, not just the code (by Chad LaVigne): “Database changes shouldn’t create a ripple in your build’s time-space continuum. You need to be able to build the entire application, including the database, as one unit. Make data and schema management a seamless part of your automated build and testing process early on and include an undo button; it will pay large dividends.”
‘Good Enough’ is good enough (by Greg Nyberg): “Don’t give in to the temptation to make your design, or your implementation, perfect! Aim for ‘good enough’ and stop when you’ve achieved it.”
Make a strong business case (by Yi Zhou): “Most people believe in “perception is reality.” Therefore, if you can control how people perceive the architectural approach you propose, it’s virtually guaranteed that you control how they will react to your proposal. How can you mange stakeholders’ perceptions? Make a strong business case for your architecture. People who have the budget authority to sponsor your ideas are almost always business-driven.”
Software doesn’t really exist (by Chad LaVigne): “Remember that a requirements document is not a blueprint and software doesn’t really exist. The virtual objects that we create are easier to change than their physical world counterparts, which is a good thing because many times they’re required to. It’s ok to plan as though we’re building an immovable object; we just can’t be surprised or unprepared when we’re asked to move said object.”
You can’t future-proof solutions (by Richard Monson-Haefel): “It’s simply not possible to future proof an architecture. No matter what architectural decision you make now, that choice will become obsolete eventually. The cool programming language you used will eventually become the COBOL of tomorrow. In short, today’s solution will always be tomorrow’s problem”
July 17th, 2009
SOA's squishy paybacks revisited
A couple of years back, I posted some observations on the issues around SOA payback. Some analysts still say there has been little to no payback from these efforts. Since SOA payback is still such a raw and confusing issue, here is an updated reprise of that post:
Short-term, measuring SOA payback is relatively straightforward. A company saves x amount of dollars by not having to reinvent a service for a new application. But the big payback happens gradually, over the years, through business gains and agility. Capturing this kind of data is, well, not so straightforward.
Perhaps SOA should incorporate a risk assessment aspect, that reviews a lot of ‘what-if’ scenarios.
This challenge is being pondered at a large company that both preaches and practices SOA — Hewlett-Packard. ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner chatted with Terri Bennett Schoenrock, executive director of SOA services and consulting integration and J2EE open source programs for Hewlett-Packard, as well as Andrew Pugsley, worldwide lead for SOA service development for HP.
HP projects it will achieve a $70 million cost savings from its global IT operations as a direct result of SOA deployments, Schoenrock told Dana. And at least $1 million of the savings happened right out of the starting gate:
“The cost savings actually start on implementation. When we look at where we measured return on investments; return on investment actually happened on go-live with our own implementation of our e-business center. Return on investment starts Quarter 1. We doubled our revenues. We halved our transaction processing requirements. We really recognized improvements right away. We achieved $1 million in cost reduction from fraud the first year we went live.”
Much of the remaining $69 million in savings will come out of a synergy implementing shared services, Schoenrock observed. “And those shared services are shared business services, and the shared services that we’re going to get in a virtualized and managed architecture running those business services.”
HP says the initial paybacks from SOA come through consolidation, reduction of redundancy and reuse across services. Then the long-term payoff comes from increased business agility, and an ability to react quicker to the marketplace. However, while the first phase is easy to measure and see payback, the second– and more lucrative — phase is more of a challenge.
For example, Pugsley said, in consulting engagements, HP can help customers come up with firm numbers that will come out of integration and consolidation. “We have a fairly well-defined methodology for consolidating applications and services. We come in and often we can give quite a good indication of how much saving would come from that.”
However, he continued, “on the agility side, it’s more tricky, because you are dealing a lot more with unexpected things.” HP encourages customers to set percentage improvement in time-to-market as a possible benchmark for improvement. “What we tend to do as part of our analysis is look at what are the events that are potentially going to happen, what’s the impact of those events, what’s the cost of the thing, how should they respond to those events, what’s the likelihood of that event occurring. From there, we can build up a picture not unlike risk assessment.”
A couple of additional points here. Business agility is a squishy, amorphous cloud, and progress here results from a number of converging factors. It may be difficult to pin all the credit for new business growth on the SOA. (Perhaps that data warehouse played a role? That new compensation system that finally rewards line employees for new innovations and contributions?) In fact, one survey showed that three out of four decision-makers say IT isn’t giving them anywhere near the agility they need. Could an SOA turn this thinking around?
Then there’s the possibility of diminishing returns to SOA deployments, as raised by David Linthicum. David said that there’s a point where the amount of resources being poured into an SOA effort may begin to exceed the benefits being gained. David calculates that most of the benefits of an SOA may be wrung out within the first five to six years.
The big gains come later as the SOA gains critical mass within the organization, thus the payback being heavier at the back end. SOA may be more about economies of scale. Perhaps the ROI comes later in the evolution, and the most expenses incurred and risks taken in the earliest years of an SOA effort, since that’s when the first components for a particular service area are designed, developed, debugged, tested, and put in the registry/repository. No special benefits are realized since only one business unit is using the new services, and initial costs may not be all that much different than the work required for a legacy application or integration project.
The equation changes when a second business comes along that can also use some of those service components. But perhaps at least three-quarters of the required services still do not exist and need to be built from scratch. The next business unit may then find an even larger list of services it can draw from, perhaps half of what’s needed, and so on. Eventually, an enterprise may reach a point where relatively little original work is required for new applications. That would mean ROI is realized through an increasing economy of scale, achieved through ever-growing reuse.
But, either scenario being the case, are organizations prepared to measure the more squishy paybacks that may occur as their business does gain more agility, reflected in better time to market and responsiveness to change? Perhaps, as Pugsley recommends, SOA should incorporate a risk assessment aspect, that reviews a lot of ‘what-if’ scenarios.
July 16th, 2009
Experts convene to analyze SOA's vital signs
Ron Schmelzer passed this on to me: he and the ZapThink crew are hosting an SOA confab next week in Boston that plays off the “SOA is Dead” theme we’ve been hearing so much about, titled “SOA: The Night of the Living Dead.”
And appropriately, Anne Thomas Manes, who stirred this whole thing up, will be there. She will be joined by industry luminaries Dana Gardner, Brenda Michelson, Sandy Rogers, Thomas Burns, and David Chappell of Oracle. ZapThinkers Ron and Jason Bloomberg will also be there — on Thursday evening, July 23rd. Can this impressive assemblage of experts revive the spirit of SOA?
July 15th, 2009
More music to the ears of SOA enthusiasts
A few weeks back, I pointed to an analogy of SOA functioning as an “iTunes” store for enterprise apps. Kudos to Fundtech’s George Ravich for making such a great analogy. He noted at the time that “the SOA service catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the iTunes playlist has had on listening to music.” (For the record, a reader pointed out that Fiorano’s Atul Saini may have originally coined the iTunes analogy back in 2006. Either way, I wish I could have thought of it!)
Now, in a follow-up post in the Financial Times, George has changed his tune — no, make that format. He has given equal time to the MP3 crowd, equating service oriented architecture to an MP3 playlist.
“Services-Oriented Architecture offers the ability for non-technical business users to build new products and services by picking and choosing from existing processes contained within an SOA services catalog. An SOA services catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the MP3 playlist has had on listening to music.”
That is, no more manual handling of vinyl records to listen to the songs you want to hear. It’s all digitized on a device or system. And whether you listen to iTunes or MP3, it doesn’t matter — it’s about the service, not the technology.
July 13th, 2009
Scheerware: Software AG scoops up BPM vendor
Another big acquisition is in the works, and a vendor is putting big money into the increasingly overlapping SOA-business process management (BPM) space. Software AG just announced that it has signed a contract with Drs. August-Wilhelm Scheer and Alexander Pocsay to acquire IDS Scheer AG, a well-established BPM vendor, for about $320 million.
According to a statement released by Software AG, the transaction will create “a global infrastructure software and BPM vendor with more than 6,000 employees and more than €1 billion in sales.” (About $1.4 billion US.)
Tony Baer says this mirrors Software AG’s acquisition of WebMethods a couple of years back to boost its presence in the SOA space, but that’s where the similarities end. While webMethods expanded the Software AG business horizontally, “IDS Scheer simply deepens one of Software AG’s existing businesses: webMethods BPM. It adds the ARIS process modeling language, which would provide yet another onramp for webMethods BPM customers,” he observes. Then there is IDS Scheer’s base of large SAP customers — in fact, Tony is surprised SAP itself didn’t make a play for IDS Scheer. The move also sets up Software AG to compete with IBM and Oracle.
There’s been plenty of talk about the chasm that still exists between the SOA and BPM worlds. But we can see hints of roadmaps to come that will help bring these two camps into a common purpose. We need more of it.
July 12th, 2009
In praise of 'slow IT'
Common wisdom says that an engine running in overdrive for an extended period of time will overheat and break down. People driving themselves too fast and hard risk breakdowns or health problems.
David Sprott recently posted an interesting piece on the need to slow down the blistering pace of IT projects. He takes a page from Carl Honoré, who advocates a “slow movement,” which says perhaps some things can get done better at a more deliberate pace.
David ponders whether the blazing-fast pace of unfettered offshoring, agile development adopted purely for speed is compromising architectural principles in favor of short-term gains. Has the time come for Slow IT?
In a post late last year, Ron Tolido coined the phrase “Slow IT, the art of careful technology,” noting that perhaps there is a backlash brewing to the hectic, real-time emphasis on get-it-now IT:
“It is about using the principles of Enterprise Architecture to create a platform for continuous business change. This is not a paradox: only on top of a simplified, secure and flexible foundation of building blocks we can orchestrate and change solutions on a daily basis. On-the-fly processes, instant collaboration, mashups and real-time intelligence: we definitely need them to deal with the hectic business requirements of today and tomorrow. But not in a breathless, ADHD style that quickly will only agitate us more. Instead we need the confidence that we took exactly the right time and dedicated exactly the right focus to create a true architecture for change.”
With Slow IT, Ron foresees “a renewed respect for properly timed and crafted technology solutions.” Plan things out well, and let the fast-paced stuff move in and out as required.
Hence the fact that we need enterprise architecture to provide a way for organizations to catch their collective breaths and think about what technology needs to be implemented, and how it will serve the business. And SOA itself is such a long-term, deliberative process.
As David puts it: “I am completely with Ron in rejecting the superficial - Web 2.0, panic package acquisitions and the like for use in serious enterprise business processes. Yes we need to transition enterprise systems to modern componentized architecture that permits continuous upgrade of smaller moving parts.”
Ron Tolido just wrote a follow-up piece endorsing David’s thoughts. He also clarifies that Slow IT doesn’t necessarily mean “doing things at a snail’s pace, doing less or doing nothing at all. Remember: it is all about proper timing and focus. Eating Slow Food does not mean waiting for hours until the waiter arrives or the first course is served.”
He repeats David Sprott’s mantra of injecting “repeatable, reusable and rapid” solutions into IT operations. In other words, “carefully craft a foundation for continuous change.”
July 9th, 2009
Extreme makeover enterprise edition: move that bus!
More advice on avoiding the much-maligned enterprise service bus, this time from a surprising quarter: an ESB vendor.
ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner quotes Ross Mason, CTO of MuleSource, who blogged about the risks of employing ESBs earlier this week. Mason is actively discouraging architects and developers from using an ESB, including MuleSource’s own open-source ESB, unless they are sure they really need one.
For example, Mason says ESBs only make sense when integrating three or more applications/services. “If you only need to communicate between two applications, using point-to-point integration is going to be easier.”
“Don’t choose an ESB or any other technology because it will look good on my resume, I don’t need the features today but there is a remote chance that I might in future, and I had a great golfing weekend with the head of sales.”
In a follow-up discussion with Dana, Mason said “over-architecting is one of the things that contributes to the problems being encountered by IT in SOA that has given the acronym a bad name.”
July 8th, 2009
Prediction: cloudy future threatens SOA vendors
Is this a good time to be an SOA vendor?
Dave Linthicum, who has been both a player and informed observer of the Web services and SOA market over the past decade, predicts that cloud computing will force some SOA vendors out of business over the next year or so. The “inevitable” marriage of SOA and cloud will result in some SOA solutions being exposed as relatively useless. One area vulnerable to the rise of cloud computing — SOA runtime governance solutions, he says.
It will be interesting to see how much more we’ll hear the term “cloud” in place of “SOA” over the coming years. But they will mean the same thing — delivery and consumption of services from both behind the firewall and across the globe. As Dave put it, “extending your SOA to cloud computing is architecturally not that complex.” However, solutions will need to address security, governance, and compliance in new ways.
July 7th, 2009
Services that scale: the 'intercloud' emerges
When clouds go global and services are shared across multiple time zones, perhaps that heralds the emergence of a new structure. Some have taken to calling this global confederation of services the “intercloud.”
Shades of the Internet, the network of networks. In a new post, Lori MacVittie provides a description of the intercloud:
“The intercloud is the natural evolution of global application delivery. The intercloud is about delivering applications (services) from one of many locations based on a variety of parameters that will be, one assumes, user/organization defined. Some of those parameters could be traditional ones: application availability, performance, or user-location. Others could be more business-focused and based on such tangibles as cost of processing.”
We had a similar discussion at a BriefingsDirect panel a few months back, in which we debated who or what would be joining forces to offer comprehensive cloud-based services. Dana Gardner and other analysts speculated that many of the large infrastructure vendors would be banding their partner ecosystems into large cloud combines.
Pushing services out into the world to anyone anywhere who needs them just won’t happen by magic, of course. Lori talks about “global load balancing” in her posts, which fits into the context of the intercloud. “What I find eminently exciting about the intercloud concept is that it requires a level of intelligence, of contextual awareness, that is the purview of application delivery,” she points out. These applications being delivered across the intercloud are even being called “services” again, a la SOA, she points out.
The challenge is that “intercloud requires a bit more awareness than global application delivery; specifically it requires more business and data center specific awareness than we have available,” she adds. Emphasis on the business part of the data. This requires automation — to try to configure a global application delivery system manually would be tedious beyond tedious.
July 7th, 2009
Webcast: SOAs, WOAs, and the clouds they create
This coming Monday, July 13th, I will be joining industry visionary Jeff Papows, president of WebLayers, for a semi-informal, interactive discussion on capitalizing on the SOA-Web Oriented Architecture (WOA)-Cloud phenomenon. The Webcast, titled “Floating Governance to the Cloud through Web Oriented Architectures and ‘As a Service’ Environments,” will commence at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
The Webcast will address the role of cloud computing in a Web oriented architecture (WOA) and the impact of software as a service (Saas) on today’s infrastructure. As part of the live roundtable, we will discuss the business and technical value of WOA, risks of SaaS and cloud computing, and how to execute a successful WOA strategy.
As often discussed here at this Weblog, SOA is much more than creating Just a Bunch of Web Services and depositing them into a registry/repository. SOA is laying the foundation for a loosely coupled business that both creates and consumes services from an ever-growing array of sources, both inside and outside the firewall. Web Oriented Architecture is a much more appropriate way to describe this philosophy, since more of these services are coming from outside providers.
I look forward to speaking with Jeff because he has been on the cutting edge of digital business for a number of years now — he served as president of both Lotus and Cognos during critical transitional times for the cmpanies. (His blog is published here).
We’ll also be exploring the role of governance as part of a larger WOA strategy; identifying and using the appropriate technology and business resources to execute a successful WOA strategy.
July 3rd, 2009
Oracle's FusionFest: BEA underneath, dogfood, Sun on the horizon
In a large splash out of Washington DC this week, Oracle rolled out the next iteration of its Fusion Middleware suite, dubbed 11g. The announcement — let’s call it “FusionFest” — was complex and densely packed, and product details have received plenty of coverage elsewhere across the Web, so we won’t go into it here. (Oracle presentation here, ZDNet also has cache of Oracle Fusion Middleware content, whitepapers and posts.)
BEA headlines FusionFest ‘09
It’s important to note that Oracle has declared “mission accomplished” in terms of bringing in all the prime pieces of last year’s BEA acquisition. In fact, the BEA’s crown jewel, the WebLogic server, has been integrated into Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g and beefed up with “new levels of operational insight and automation,” as well as Oracle Grid capabilities. “In 11g, there’s a lot of integration with the BEA products,” Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware products, said at a press conference leading up to the launch. “WebLogic server is the strategic application server which is the basis of the 11g product family.”
My pal Tony Baer weighed in on FusionFest, stating that while the new product details were pretty “anticlimatic,” it was noteworthy that this was more about BEA than Oracle pre-BEA. “Oracle had Fusion middleware prior to acquiring BEA, but there’s little question that BEA was the main event. WebLogic filled the donut hole in the middle of the Fusion stack with a server that was far more popular than Oracle Containers for Java EE (OC4J),” he writes. “Singlehandedly, BEA catapulted Oracle Fusion into becoming a major player in middleware.”
Of course, the impending Sun Microsystems acquisition is another massive pile-o’-stuff coming down the pike — and perhaps the theme for FusionFest ‘10. Or, as Miko Matsumura likes to call this next emerging combine, “Snorkel.” Miko cautions against relying on a single stack from one vendor for all middleware needs.
Between BEA, and soon, Sun, there’s a ton of middleware from a lot of different place for a lot of different uses coming under a single domain. As ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner put it: “Oracle is well on its way to obviating the middleware moniker. Perhaps we should call it ‘anyware.’” Dana was on a roll, suggesting that Oracle really needs to hop on the cloudtrain to really start making this monstrosity work. “The 11g continental conglomeration must be the gateway for the enveloping 12c, as in “c” for cloud. You don’t need to be an oracle to factor that clear and necessary path to the future,” he says.
Dana also feels these acquisitions and integrated suites are giving Oracle the edge. “Of the still-standing middleware field — IBM, Microsoft, Software AG, Red Hat/JBoss, Progress, TIBCO, SAP and Sybase — only a few will be both able to get the ‘anyware’ in terms of product breadth and of cloud delivery.”
Another interesting point by Oracle’s Rizvi is that his company is eating its own dogfood. All new Oracle products going forward (and I presume that includes the database and E-Business Suite) will be constructed from the Fusion Middleware suite itself. As he put it: “11g middleware is the platform on which we are developing the next generation of Oracle applications. So the next generation of the applications that we are developing is also leveraging the same principles that our customers will be leveraging. We have been working with our applications division for over a year in terms of early use of 11g.”
ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan also provides coverage of FusionFest, noting the immensity of what is a complex and often mis-understood strategy on the part of Oracle: “To say there are a few moving parts in Oracle’s Fusion day is a bit of an understatement,” he mused.
ZDNet colleague and Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett says that he’s “still betting that in the long term, Oracle’s strategy will be shown as fundamentally flawed.” That’s because Oracle has been on a massive acqusition binge — 58 over the last six years. “It’s a pantomime horse of many moving parts the company is trying to pull together and which may one day see its nadir in Fusion Applications.” He adds that the mega-suite approach doesn’t have a great history. Oracle is demonstrating that it has a “vise-like grip on everything from hardware through middleware and on to applications,” he said. “No vendor on the planet has successfully pulled off the ‘end-to-end one-stop shop’ trick and Oracle most certainly won’t do it.”
We’ll have to see if Oracle pulls it off, and perhaps provide more details at FusionFest ‘10. Will Sun be the headline there? Probably not enough time, but it only took 12 months to fuse BEA into the Oracle machine.
July 1st, 2009
Do we need cloud oriented architecture?
One of the criticisms leveled at service oriented architecture is that the ‘architecture’ aspect has often been overlooked. In one of his latest analyses, ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer wonders where architecture fits among all the excitement around cloud computing.
“The discussion of architecture has been given short shrift in cloud computing conversations. In much the same way that the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) conversation degenerated into a conversation about the (often unnecessary) Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), the cloud conversation is degenerating into one about the infrastructure needed to handle scalable service provider volume.”
Cloud providers have been more concerned with infrastructural concerns than business requirements, Ron said. “When the ‘architecture team’ meets in these cloud providers, what problems are they aiming to solve? Business problems?” he asks. “Certainly not. … Where’s the business in all this? The answer: nowhere.”
As a result, Ron also pointed out that moving to the cloud will not take away the need for solid enterprise architecture go away — it will make EA even more important.
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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