SOA filling the Gaps

O n March 28th 2011 I participated in the STKI Summit by the local analysts company STKI.  The company headed by Dr. Jimmy Schwarzkopf is focused on the Israeli market.  Presentations were based on an Israeli market survey performed by the company. The company's analysts presentations topics were Infrastructure Trends, Applications Trends, Office of the CIO trends and Infrastructure Services Trends, followed by wrap-up IT Trends presentation by Jimmy. The survey may not be accurate but the information is valuable and probably reflects the overall market status.     The theme of this year conference was: Manage Scattered. The prime areas appearing in all presentations were: Mobile Computing , Social Computing and Cloud Computing .  The combination of them is the basis for creation of totally different IT industry, as well as Business and Personal Interaction and Collaboration. The theme is about IT efforts and solutions which are executed wit...

Few years ago a SOA Guru employed by one of the vendors paid a visit to my country and discussed SOA issues with a group of local architects. His reaction to my comment that a major goal of SOA is Business and IT alignment was that Business and IT alignment is only a buzzword. Real SOA is ESB based implementations. I could find at least 4 or 5 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) products which are superior to his company's solutions (and I am not the only one: Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave at that time agreed with my opinion). The limitation of that vendor's ESB solution is not the point. The point is expressed extremely in Burton Group 's analyst Anne Thomas-Manes famous post SOA is dead Long Live Services : In many cases we (IT experts) implemented SOA wrongly due to lack of Business alignment . Another important point was discussed by ex - ZapThink 's analyst David Linthicum in a Zapflash titled: Avoid Vendor Driven Architecture (VDA)!   Many ...

A leading Cellular network company in Israel, Partner Communications Company Ltd ., provider of the Orange network in Israel, presented its SOA implementation in December 26 th meeting of the SOA Forum of the Israeli Association of Information Processing . I am moderating the forum since its imitation on March 2005. The forum meetings take place once in a month. The forum is opened for anyone involved or interested in SOA activities. Most of the meetings included presentations and discussions. The 16 th meeting was exceptional: experts' panel on SOA Governance . The presenter was Iddo Rachlewski (Infrastructure Applications Development Manager). Aharon Winder Partner's CTO , who joined us, answered the toughest questions asked by forum members. Background The Telecom service industry business model and technological infrastructure is changing due to Web based IP phone services, Wireless & Cellular communication and the need to transfer new types of data in additi...

Many years ago I read a Sufi tale about an elephant coming to a town in which all residents were born blind. No one of them have the slightest knowledge about elephants because no one ever traveled outside that town and this elephant was the first of his specie paying a visit to that town. The blind people touched the huge elephant and disputed about the question: What this object is? A blind man/woman who touched the elephant's leg thought it is a pillar. Another one touching his ear thought it is a big fan. The third blind man thought it is a pipe because he touched its trunk etc. The blind people argued and argued and could not agree upon a common definition of that object. The context of that tale is philosophical. However, when we look at SOA definitions we find partial definitions from the viewpoint of Developer s, Architect s, Analyst s, System Administrators and Business people. Business people may describe SOA as a collection of Business Services and Business Processes. ...