SOA Success Plus Wiki

By Nick Hortovanyi

Recently, we have created a SOA Success Plus wiki. This wiki is open to all, who register, to contribute if they so desire regarding experiences around SOA. Yes, wikis are all the rage at the moment and we are working out how to gain contribution from the larger SOA attentioned community as we go!

I've created a front page of types but am now thinking of creating six major sections being:

1. SOA Architecture Style;
2. Governance for SOA - both business and IT;
3. SOA Tools;
4. SOA Platforms;
5. Knowledge Transfer; and
   
6. Services (well this one is open to interpretation a little ).

Any assistance, suggestions or comments on getting this wiki up would be greatly appreciated.

SaaS will surge in 2008

By Nick Hortovanyi

Phil Wainewright has written an excellent blog entry Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008. The entry is positive but still the key needs will be to overcome objections of on premise IT thought leaders in conjunction with the reliability and quality of SaaS enabled applications. Among those objections, I believe high on the list will be the perception of loss of control through not owning the infrastructure out right.

One perceived way of giving some control to the on premise guys, that I've previously talked about, is the Customer Premised Cloud. But this may increasing be relented to the "nice to have" basket as Economic factors drive the expected cost down to provide services.

Current savvy enterprise buyers know how to reduce buy prices, but they are now pushing the margins down on channel participants, especially VARs to under 2%. As there is not much more to go here, what are these buyers going to do when the next mantra comes down to reduce capital and operating expenditure by 10%? Well, I hope its going to drive the demand for SaaS.

Predictions for 2008 using my del.icio.us tag cloud

By Nick Hortovanyi

Its that time of year, when writing about your predictions for 2008 is all the rage. I've been tagging some by others on del.icio.us with prediction2008.

I've included my current del.licio.us tags in descending order of importance. It highlights the areas that I have had an active interest in either for current work or for research of future activities. So i've used them as the subjects for my predictions for 2008.

my del.icio.us tags

• SaaS
• business
• web2.0
• ibm
• soa
• via:aqualung
• development
• google
• collaboration
• innovation
• Microsoft
• architecture
• blog
• Java
• lotus+connections
• opensource

SaaS

Software as a Service will continue to become mainstream , as skilled resources become harder to find, internet connectivity latency decreases with the corresponding increase in bandwidth capacity. Wall Street will be even more attracted to the SaaS recurring pricing models, such that it will provide a higher potential exit price for Venture Capital backed organisations. Thus driving high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation in the SaaS sector then in comparison to traditional on-premise software delivery companies.

Business

Will continue to see their core Information Technology assets as a cost of doing business and will treat it as a commodity component. IT Consultants will find new ways to work with business, that is more closely aligned to business innovation within their specific industry. Nothing that new here, but internal IT skills will become less IT technical and more analytics driven. Marketing departments will take on more responsibility for analytics and data warehousing to improve marketing ROI.

Local markets in the developed world will continue to become a deeper shade of "red", as competition increases, driving exploration of new markets for growth through volume and innovation in delivery and execution. 

Web2.0

Is a technical label, that has been assigned to represent a change of thinking regarding memes around a social and networked world. It has signaled the rise of the long tail, being that of the boutique network connected micro-economy. Organisations in 2008, will reevaluate their methods of engaging with the market, and the micro-economy, as the number of larger and mid tiered firms dissipate through M&As.

IBM

IBM will embrace cloud computing (eg blue cloud) but have difficulties in engaging with customers in this area; whilst it is still perceived internally as a hardware and people services company. Margins for resellers, will continue to dwindle (hardware and software) as IBM software sales, outside of SMB, finally exceed hardware sales and thus moves focus from hardware. IBM will continue to work on, but won't formulate wining strategies in 2008, to take market spend from Microsoft in the SMB software area. IBM's sales force in 2008, focused on on-premise engagement will have difficulties with the off-premise SaaS nature of cloud computing. In 2008, there will be some high profile success stories publicized for Blue Cloud.

SOA

Service Oriented Architecture will continue to drive new systems and rationalisation of existing within the larger enterprises. Adoption of the SOA Architecture Style within enterprises will increase. However, unless machine generated, WS-* style service adoption will decrease. Skilled IT Architects capable of service decomposition  between business services and technical services will be in short supply for 2008.

SOA will continue to drive the demand for new on-premise middleware products. A number of new products will emerge in 2008, possible based on SCA/SDO, that allow utilisation of multiple programming languages and development paradigms.

via:aqualung

Thanks Ric lots of great material. Think more will come, including lots of great riffs and conversations. In 2008, I predict Ric will be writing more blog entries. 

Development

The Art of Developing computer systems will start to influence education in the area of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Iterative agile development processes will continue to be favored over waterfall methodologies. Some procurement departments will explore contracts that allow iterative development methodologies, but this will still not be the norm in 2008. This disconnect between what developers do and what contracts state will continue.

There will be increased interest in scripting languages such as Python and Ruby and further exploration of languages or changes to existing languages to support parallel computing. Functional languages such as ErLang, Haskell and OCaml will gain more of the spotlight.

Google 

Google will continue to influence developers through its Google Code. Google SaaS based services will influence development approaches and continue to play havoc with administrators who favor closed firewalls and block external high use URLs. Google will utilise more personal profile data to improve search results and at the same time use it to increase Ad revenue from targeted advertising.

Smaller SMBs will gain trust in Google and really start to question the value/cost of maintaining on-premise infrastructure.

Collaboration

Social software will gain some traction in more forward thinking organisations but it will still be an enathma to command and control based management. New products will be developed that utilise analytics in conjunction with project management methodologies to form groups/teams for delivery of specific deliverables based on a continuously moving project plan (isn't this what we do anyway manually?).

Innovation

Business will seek innovation to be internally driven and not from vendors, but will struggle with out outside influence. Australia will invest heavily in building infrastructure to support exporting of innovation overseas.

Microsoft

Will recover the market position lost with WindowsVista . SaaS (or as they call it Software plus Services) will continue to attract media spotlight as Microsoft seeks to gain new revenue streams and move focus from on-premise software. Huge internal debates over this will continue with little leakages, every now and then, to the market over the 2008 year. Headlines may move from Google vs Microsoft to IBM vs Microsoft, if Blue Cloud is a success.

Architecture

IT architecture will be important in organisations, as an enabler of structure. Many more titles containing the term Architecture will evolve in the 2008 year. IT Architects (of whatever title) will continue to find new ways of explaining the value of this abstract thinking to business and further consolidation of this knowledge will occur on the internet, such as at IASA.

Blog

PR agencies will learn how to influence the blogosphere. The informal citizen journalist will continue to eat into the revenues of traditional print media. Blogging in conjunction with bookmarking will become the preferred means over google to find "trusted" content and advice.

Java 

This is the pinnacle year for Java, the programming language, in the enterprise world. As concurrent computing needs are accelerated through the multi-core focus of CPU vendors, it may be perceived that the effort to modify the Java language specifications is higher then the benefits gained by using other programming languages. SOA standards, such as SCA and SDO, are evolving to be language neutral, this will reduce the reliance on Java in enterprise middleware products.

Lotus Connections

This is an interesting product, that shows the possibilities of internet based software behind the firewall. The 2007 year saw, too many new products evolve from IBM in my view, thus there may be in 2008, a consolidation of products to compete against Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services in the SMB space. My blog receives a large number of hits for "sharepoint vs websphere portal" searches on google, so it wouldn't surprise me if Lotus Connections is rolled into WebSphere Portal Express for the SMB market.

Open Source

Will still be here at the end of 2008. Microsoft will continue to push new standards based around its technology stack. The next killer app may emerge if usability and visual issues can be addressed. Has Windows Vista opened the door for the Linux desktops? We'll see this time next year.

What are the alternatives to a SOA style architecture?

By Nick Hortovanyi

Some people I have spoken to recently have suggested that they are not convinced as yet that a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) style architecture is correct for their organisation.

The major vendors are all promoting SOA and for better or for worse it is the architectural style that is being used for new projects. It may not necessarily be called SOA. But largely, if the architecture is not a 80s/90s style client/server model, then there will be a business tier that exposes services at some granularity to be consumed by a presentation tier or another business tier service.

So the main alternative for a SOA style architecture would be to more tightly couple the integration moving back to a 80s/90s style client/server model. Some organisations have still not moved from this model.

Portal technology as an onramp to SOA

By Nick Hortovanyi

A number of organisations use Portal technology as an onramp to SOA. Have you ever wondered why?

A SOA architecture style enables a number of services to be exposed that can be consumed by a number of other services or business components. A key issue in this environment will be the granularity of the service. This is such an interesting topic! I could really spend the next few months writing about it. However, a Portal, normally through discrete portlets, allows a service to be consumed in an atomic manner. That is the portlet will utilise the capabilities of that service with out the potential need to interact with one or more other services, thus introducing the need to ensure control transactional consistency across the services.

Many portlets can be assembled on a page, and through the use of wires, these can be assembled into a composite application. As the user selects something in one portal a message is sent through the wire to the other portlets. Normally there will only be one update type portlet hence only one update service engaged in transaction. Therefore it becomes the responsibility of the ESB, if being used, or the service being invoked to maintain transactional integrity.

One could argue, that this is working around some issues and in reality it is! I would suggest not trying to overcome these limitations at this time. If you have a different argument leave a comment, would love to hear about it.