SOA needs supporting architecture

Dan Rosanova recently wrote a post at CIO about how many companies often adapt SOA because it is what many companies are interested in when starting architeture. However, he notes that while SOA is a good thing, it may not perform to its higest potential if there aren't other architectural software structures in place to support it. Read the full article here.

SOA is Not Dead

The figures from our latest poll show us 60% of enterprise architects believe that SOA is indeed, not dead. Do you agree with these figures?

Take our Poll: Is SOA dead?

We’ve gotten quite some responses from our LinkedIn group members in a recent discussion thread, and so here is a quick poll you can take on whether or not you believe SOA is dead. We’ll be posting the results next Friday. Happy polling!

SOA is dead

Anne Thomas Manes recently declared SOA dead. This failed experiment was suppose to reduce companies costs and increase their agility. But as we've seen the economy fall, it has not held up to its promises.

The demise of SOA is tragic for the IT industry. Organizations desperately need to make architectural improvements to their application portfolios. Service-orientation is a prerequisite for rapid integration of data and business processes; it enables situational development models, such as mashups; and it’s the foundational architecture for SaaS and cloud computing. (Imagine shifting aspects of your application portfolio to the cloud without enabling integration between on-premise and off-premise applications.) Although the word “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever.

What do you think about the current state of SOA? Is it indeed dead?

What is the role of a Enterprise Architect in a programme?

This post on CIO Knowledge Base explains how an enterprise architect is not needed if enterprise architecture is present and a manager is simply trying to ensure that a new project will fit with the existing architecture. On the other hand, if the project involves changes a scope of the enterprise architecture, then managers will have to consult with the enterprise architect. Program managers have the ability to monitor implementation of enterprise architecture as long as no changes needed to be made to the infrastructure itself. How does your company define the role of an enterprise architect in a progamme?

What impact will Cloud Computing have on your enterprise architecture?

Browsing the blogosphere I came across this podcast from the SOA Infrastructure blog where David Bressler, SOA Evangelist at Progress Software, presents his thoughts on how cloud computing will make it simpler for businesses to get critical information to their consumers, and help them make better decisions. David brings in several examples in this podcast including one from Salesforce.com. The podcast is about 10 minutes long so take a few moments to listen to it and share your thoughts here. Enjoy!

Listen to the podcast

Apache Tuscany Enables SOA solutions to More Easily Respond to New Business Requirements

The SOA Network reports that Apache Tuscany has released version 1.3.2 of its Service Component Architecture (SCA) for Java.

Apache Tuscany provides a dependable infrastructure for deploying, running, and building SOA solutions as well as addressing real business problems posed by SOA. Anthony Elder, ASF Vice President and Chair of the Apache Tuscany Project Management Committee mentions:

"Over the past two years, the Tuscany community has focused on developing fully open, standards-based, large-scale SOA solutions. We continue to receive enthusiastic support for Tuscany's simple, highly extensible Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO), and Data Access Service (DAS) subprojects. Becoming an ASF Top-Level Project and great ideas for future development -- including improvements in application server integration, distributed runtimes and Web 2.0 support -- underscore how Tuscany continues to go from strength to strength."

It will be interesting to see how this infrastructure will play out in the upcoming months.

Synovus Financial Adopts EA

Recently, Synovus Financial won an award for successfully implementing SOA from CIO Magazine and SOA Consortium. Their goal was to create a secure vault payment platform and an Automated Clearing House payment program. To find out more about how they were able to successfully implement SOA properly, please read the article here.

Eight Characteristics for SOA Implementation

Mike Kavis at CIO.com recently compiled a list of the behaviors that can contribute to the efficient implementation of SOA.

-Strong Executive Level Sponsorship and SOA Evangelist
Someone in your company with power should be behind the project. This drive change throughout the organization and also helps work through any roadblocks that may arise during implementation.
-Define Completeness of Work within Services The business needs to understand why SOA is important to their needs. Fina a way to demonstrate that it's going to be an asset and value in the future
-Established a Center of Excellence (CoE) Appoint someone who will be in charge of the SOA initiative. Have controls in place to define to show the SOA results.
-Start With a Well-defined Business Process and Scale Up Start with one strong business process your company has in place then work up. And have your vision in place so you can reach that in the future.
-Define Completeness of Work within Services Put thought into which services are key business drivers. Only choose those businesses services that add value to the company.
-Quality Assurance is Key Be sure to include performance, security and governance testing in your plans.
-ROI Is Difficult to Achieve Initially and Is Realized Over Time Value is maximized with architecture over time. ROI will begin to develop and spread as the projects gain maturity.
-Deliver Substantial Business Value

MEGA Releases System Blueprint

According to this latest post on GCN, Mega is introducing MEGA System Blueprint, which is a software tool that links application design with business requirements for modern IT systems.

With this software tool users can define any specification, ranging from requirements analysis, system design, and SOA projects. The tool will allow application design metadata to be stored close to information on IT architecture and business processes. MEGA System Blueprint is priced at $4,000. It will be interesting to see if we will see huge improvements in EA with the release of this application in the enterprise.

EA is in Demand

This post on SearchSoa.com highlights how there is a huge demand for IT professionals with skills and certifications including project management and enterprise architects due to service-oriented architecture.

David Foote, CEO and chief research officer for Foote Partners mentions:

"SOA is a huge collection of skills. There's a lot to SOA so it's a very, very broad category."

This has caused companies to seek architects who not only understand SOA, but those who also have knowledge of business models and understand specific corporate culture.

SOA -- Is it really a business problem?

Joe McKendrick at ZD Net recently pointed out that most businesses believe SOA is purely an IT problem. Jeff Schneider is one of those who agrees:

“Sure, I.T. problems, like HR or garbage collection, may bubble their way up to become a business problem, but at the end of the day I.T. has to figure out how to do their job and go do it. When the janitor picks up the trash in my office they do it in the most efficient way they know how. They don’t ask ‘the business’ if they should do it efficiently - they just do it. When did I.T. become such wussies?”

So how do we overcome this potential road block in implementing SOA into the enterprise? Offer solutions that include SOA for business problems. SOA as a be all and end all solution might not work well, but showing the value of certain proponents will work well for the enterprise.

What is WOA

This article from cnetnews.com states: Web-oriented architecture (WOA), a descriptive term for a subset of service- oriented architecture (SOA), has recently arisen as the next buzz-phrase to help further confuse the IT architect. So what is it? The article explains that WOA is an implementation of SOA that utilizes representational state transfer resources that permit data and services to be utilized through a uniform resource identifier. Another explanation comes from Nick Gall from Gartner:

WOA is an architectural style that is a substyle of SOA based on the architecture of the www with the following additional constraints: globally linked, decentralized, and uniform intermediary processing of application state via self-describing messages.

Growth of SOA in India

Business Standard mentioned today, in this article, that India is expected to have the “fastest growing SOA market in the Asia-Pacific region”. Springboard Research has predicted that this market will have a compound annual growth rate of 49% from 2006 to 2009. Many organizations are already starting to seize this opportunity. Intelligroup, one company interested in this growth rate, believes that 20% of the “larger SAP customer in India” will be adopting SOA within the year. Liladhar Bagad, practice head of Intelligroup, released this statement as a means to explain this growth:

“As organisations become more global, SOA will become an integral part of their strategy. It is aimed at lowering the total cost of ownership, simplifying integration and customisation. Organisations are increasingly embracing SOA as a means to access and distribute information in real time”

It is cautioned, however, that organizations need to be aware of disappointment that some companies may announce. As Chandika Mendi, director and head of Virtusa Corporation, explained

“The reason for the disappointment will be due to taking a much narrowed approach while defining SOA, which could lead to failure of implementations. Also, the initial investment in SOA is high and will reap benefits slowly as the entire enterprise moves to it, which is a fairly long journey,”

Adopting SOA: More than just getting the software

In a recent article at CIO, Ty Anderson discuses how adopting SOA into the business is like buying a total home gym. Buying it doesn’t get the job done, it’s important to use the purchase continually in order to get the benefits the software can offer.

-- It’s important to audit existing applications. See what the processes are for your current business processes. Know what you’ve got so you can start in the right place.

-- Make the services as simple as possible

-- Work with your SOA tools every day. You’ve got to continually work towards the adoption, day in and day out to find out how the software truly works.

-- Keep working – Now that you’ve got SOA, it’s important to keep it current. Learn what’s new in the software and implement additional tools that are beneficial to your company.

And throughout the whole process, have someone there to keep you going in the right direction. A mentor can help you achieve your goals and keep you working towards the benefits of SOA.

The IT and Business Divide

In this article the pIT stop panel was interviewed about the possibility of enterprise architecture in bridging a gap between the IT and business divide. Their answer was

“If I had a polo mint for every time I heard that a technology or approach would provide “alignment” between IT and the business I would walk around with permanently fresh breath.”

While they say there is no easy fix in bridging the divide, they did say that this did not negate the importance of “establishing formal ‘enterprise architecture’” They said that they have seen improvements in IT and business alignment especially in terms of SOA. One piece of advice they gave was to start small. In addition, they mentioned that instead of simply relying on technology or an approach, it is important for organizations to understand the importance of “human factors”.

Start Small for SOA

This article brings up an interesting point that it may be best to start small when it comes to introducing SOA to an enterprise. While the initial reaction maybe to begin with projects that are high profile, oftentimes without the cooperation from the IT and business departments such projects have the potential to lead to frustration, and ultimately may make individuals feel that SOA failed. To prevent this feeling, it could be beneficial to start on smaller projects where there is plenty of cooperation in order to build “momentum”. With one successful project, it becomes easier to show the benefits in order to gain cooperation on the second, and thereby gaining trust in the usefulness of SOA for organizations.

Carphone Warehouse sees benefits to SOA

As reported by this article at CIO, Carphone Warehouse, a mobile phone retailer in the UK, moved to SOA in 2005. Even though they saw immediate benefits, there were other things that were still falling behind in their IT system. There were still 53% of new service designs that were failing governance tests the first time and there was still duplication in some of the services performed.

As a result, they adopted HP Systinet. This SOA governance tool helped 95% of new service designs pass the governance test. It has also estimated that this new software will save them £526,000 over the next three years, due to the avoidance of duplicating processes. It also will allow the IT department to deliver new services to the business in the shortest amount of time possible.

Do you think that corporations selling SOA governance tools are starting to respond more to customers needs?

SOA Presentation

Recently I saw this interesting slideshare presentation that discusses Service Oriented Architecture titled “The Service Oriented Elephant”. Some of the main points that it covers include: Building Blocks of SOA, Organization Roadmap – How much SOA, and Implementation scenarios. Take a few minutes to go over this and let us know your thoughts. Do you have any observations or musings regarding the presentation?

Service Oriented Elephant

view presentation (tags: enterprise architecture service orientation web services soa)

The Government’s Incremental Move Towards SOA

This latest post on the SOA Network details how the latest report from Input, a leader in the authority of government business, discusses that the government’s growing adoption of SOA practices will fundamentally change how it delivers internal citizen-facing services. The federal market can benefit from increased agility and better IT alignment that SOA brings to the table.

Deniece Peterson, senior analyst at INPUT mentions:

"SOA shifts the concept of the application into a highly dynamic and fluid marketplace of plug-and-play services. A function previously performed by one vendor's application could now be completed by a number of discrete services provided by a multitude of providers. The standardized environment required to make this happen could severely impact the provider who relies heavily on proprietary elements for competitive advantage."

It is still early in the process to see a dramatic change in the federal SOA market as SOA solutions are slowly being integrated into the customer’s environment. The findings from Input can be found here, “Service-Oriented Architecture: Implications for Government and Industry”.