SOA filling the Gaps

Almost every Information Technology implementation and IT Architecture includes Information and Data. SOA is not an exception. The following sections will highlight some important aspects relating SOA to Enterprise Information. SOA and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) I recently read an A berdeen Group Survey published in February 2008. The survey title is Enterprise Information Integration : The Foundation for Business Success and Transformation. While reading it I almost thought I am reading about SOA: Abstraction EII is an integration architecture abstracting the data source. Agility and Business Responsiveness This Abstraction Layer is Business Responsiveness and IT Agility enabler. Black Box - Data Consumers are not aware of the information sources, Information infrastructure (e.g. databases) and location (e.g. specific instance of a database or a specific file) could be changed without changing the co...

In a keynote presentation many years ago I presented a Spiral model of IT Advancement or IT Evolution described in the illustration above. Instead of advancing like more mature industries as described in the blue line, IT evolves in a spiral way: Going to one direction and afterwards to the opposite direction. As shown in the illustration IT advances on time axis, but due to the spiral pattern it evolves more slowly. Recently Gartner Group 's analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald claimed that Windows will collapse if Microsoft will not change drastically the way it builds this Operating System . According to the analysts the operating system is too complex due to accumulation of code since old times Windows. The result is growing difficulty to maintain the code, which eventually will cause collapse of the operation system, unless Microsoft will shift its Operating Systems upgrades paradigm. Windows was a standalone Personal Computer operating System afterwards ...

I recently read EbizQ 's SOA Market Pulse a global SOA survey done by the company via internet published on January 2008 and sponsored by IBM . The survey is not a scientific survey, because the sample may be biased. However, Major SOA Trends are probably reflected. I would suspect that more refined findings are not accurate. The most interesting findings in my opinion are: Current State Finding: Almost half of the participants have any SOA implementation and another third have plans to implement SOA. My Take : SOA is Mainstream but not yet implemented in most enterprises. (Similar finding of 48% was found in the on the spot Israeli survey done in STKI Summit). SOA Efforts Finding: Most of the companies build "Islands of SOA": Multiple SOA initiatives with multiple teams and no centralized control. In some organizations there are ten different SOA initiatives. My Take : Probably it is not easy for large enterprises to have a single unified S...

Many years ago in 1995 or 1996 the mainstream IT community view was that Mainframes are doomed and will be replaced by cheaper and more flexible Client/Server technology. Xephon , published a white paper titled: Mainframe and the Dinosaurus Myth. The thesis presented in this paper was that Mainframe is cheaper than Client/Server due to high maintenance costs of distributed Client/Server.  The term maintenance costs includes higher support costs for Client/Server. After few years of experiencing Client/Server limitations Xephon unpopular theory was supported, at least as far as large enterprises were concerned. More than decade after the Dinosaurus myth, one surprising finding in STKI Israeli Market Survey was related to Mainframe. According to the survey 40% of Israeli IT budgets are allocated to Mainframes. If you search for Mainframe in the conference presentation slides, you will not find any occurrence of it. This finding was mentioned by Pini Cohen during his pres...