SOA filling the Gaps

On March 24 th I participated in the STKI Summit by the local analysts company STKI . The company headed by Dr. Jimmy Schwartzkopf is focused on the Israeli market. The theme of this year conference was: Back to Basics. 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. A less accurate on the spot survey results were presented afterwards. The following bullets highlights SOA perspective as it was presented: Disappointments from SOA implementations results SOA implementations are lagging behind expectations: It takes longer time than expected and consumes more resources. Benefits form SOA projects i...

A new SOA product VeN4 ServiceWare developed by Venotion Technologies was presented in the 20 th meeting of the SOA Forum of the Israeli Association of Information Processing on March 12 th . Venotion Technologies is an Israeli startup, presenting a unique approach to SOA implementation. The presenter was Ronen Yochpaz the company's CTO. The product is focused on the Finance sector especially the Banking and Insurance industry. Many Core Banking application systems and Insurance applications are legacy systems developed over more than 20-30 years ago on IBM Mainframes and z/OS operating system. Venotion's product aimed at using existing assets as part of a SOA implementation. Currently the product is in Beta. General Availability is expected on April 2008. Basic Concepts and product highlights The product composes automatically the Business Model by Reverse Business Engineering of existing User Interface and IT assets. Execution is in the Testing environment and no...

ZapThink 's analyst David Linthicum wrote a zapflash titled: Avoid Vendor Driven Architecture (VDA).In this Zapflash David Linthicum describes two prevailing SOA implementation patterns: buying SOA products from existing vendors and letting these vendors to design and define the solution. According to his analysis the outcome of such approach will be a failed SOA implementation because SOA is Architecture and not Technology, so the expectation of out of the box magic technology solution to improper architecture is both unrealistic and misleading. As an experienced consultant I would add to this that whatever the technology or architecture is vendors are biased towards their own solutions and vendors employees rewards are dependent upon sales. This post is not about VDA but about VDS or V endor D riven S urveys. Same as Architectures build by vendors are suspect to bias towards their solutions; results of Surveys executed by vendors probably will be biased towards their so...

Simple SOA is the moto of Udi Dahan 's presentation in the 19 th meeting of the SOA Forum of the I sraeli Association of Information Processing on February 17 th . . According to Udi, SOA architectures are sometimes too complex, the term Service is overloaded and may define different kind of entities. Udi presented step by step a unique SOA model which was discussed by the forum members. Model Highlights The following highlights describe Udi's SOA model principles: It is a Loosely Coupled model Loose Coupling starts with the Business Service definitions are Business definitions A Service is a very coarse grained entity defining business functionality e.g. Customer Care, Sales, Fulfillment, marketing, Billing. Each Service owns its database or files. The communication between services is simple one way messaging. No Request-Response and no transactions are part of the model. Business Processes are inter Services events Events not...

A previous post   SOA & BPM referred the issue of bidirectional gateway between BPM modeling and BPM implementation. The build of updated model from changed implementation or vice versa could also be termed as Round Tripping. Recently, I read an Industry Trends Report named "BRIDGING THE BUSINESS-IT DIVIDE IN ENTERPRISE CLASS PROCESSES" written by Bruce Silver Associates . The trends report topic is BPM and its relationship to SOA . The report illustrates the difficulties of bridging between Business BPM Analysts and Information Technology experts and also between SOA type BPM based on BPEL and Human based BPM nased upon Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) OMG 's standard. The Round Tripping of BPEL based execution and BPMN based modeling is another challenge. Another issue analyzed is the requirement for bridging between Metadata model, Data model and Programming model developed by using different tool sets. The context of the report is limited ...

This post is the 6th post in the "Web 2.0 for dummies" posts, based on my Web 2.0 presentation in a conference. After tasting Web 2.0 (part 2) and understanding what it is (part 4) we will drill down to more specific Web 2.0 principles and implelentations. What are Virtual Worlds? Virtual World is computerized simulation to which Real World laws apply (e.g. Time, Gravitation etc.). Participation is by using a virtual identity or virtual image called Avatar. Avatar’s communication with other Avatars is by text, sound and motion (gestures). Virtual Worlds types can be classified into the following categories: Single Player Games SIMS is an example of single player game in which the player creates a virtual reality. However, a Single Player Game scope is limited and it is not a Web 2.0 application. The player may even play using his local computer without Web connection. Massively multi player online role playing games (MMORPG) These games are part of Web 2.0. The play...

The bigest Software Vendors are continuosly bying other companies. The most recent acquisitions are BEA 's acquisition by Oracle and the anouncement that Sun Microsystems is going to aquire MySQL . As SOA is the main topic of this blog, I will focus on the first acquisition, which is related to SOA. MySQL acquisition process by Sun is not directly related to SOA. BEA is a long time target for acquisition: a technology leader with significant market share which is also significantly smaller than its competitors like IBM , Microsoft or Oracle. On January 18th 2004 I published an article in Hebrew titled: Why BEA will not be aquired by Microsoft? This article was a response to a Research Note by Yankee Group 's analyst Dana Gardner, which correctly described the acquisitions trend. However, I disagreed with the scenario of Microsoft bying BEA. My argument was that I am not sure if any of the bigger companies will aquire BEA, but if any company will aquire BEA, it will be Oracle a...