SOA filling the Gaps

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...

Is Software Problem Determination a Logical or Scientific process based on cause analysis and repeatable observation or is it a Zen style art, which has nothing to do with Western culture logic?    I asked myself this question few days ago while trying to find why Microsoft 's Office 2003 Word and Outlook stopped functioning. The answer is that maybe it is not Zen art training in which the user should experience unification of himself and the computer like the unification of the archer and the arch as a mean for hiting the target with an arrow in Zen Archery mastering. Surely, it has nothing to do with logical Problem-Determination.    My background is different from the background of a typical home Office user. In the 1970s and 1980s I was an MVS Systetms Programmer responsible for the operating system in a site with few thousands users. My responsibilities include maintaining changes to operating system components in the Object code format and source code form...

This post is the 5 th 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 implementations. The origin of Mashups is in Music: Creating a new song by combining songs. In information technology Mashups are applications build by non-IT Professionals by combining together data or applications from different sources, which were not planned for integration together. The User assembles and links services to create an application The services could be data services or could include Business Logic functionality The user publishes the application in the Web so other users may use it or expand it as another Mashup . Technologies used for building a Mashup based on simple published API s include HTML , XML , simple Web Services and Representational State Transfer (REST). By using JavaScript or other scripting languag...

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. ...

The presenter in the 15th meeting of the SOA Forum of the Israeli Association of Information Processing (June 2007) was Brent Carlson , Founder and CTO of LogicLibrary who was named to InfoWorld’s ranking of the Top 25 CTOs in business today. His presentation topic was: Service Lifecycle Governance: Principles and Best Practices. Unfortunately, he was stuck in a traffic jam, so I talked to the forum members until his arrival. I discussed the current status of SOA implementations in Israel. The two main points were: 1. Only few enterprises have a significant SOA production implementation 2. I am able to identify two enterprises that will surely fail in their SOA imitative just by a short discussion with them. One of the participants argued that my first point is not valid. He said that he is aware of enterprises implementing hundreds of Web Services . I answered that implementing hundreds of Web Services is not necessarily implementing SOA. Unsurprisingly, Brent Carlson's opi...

This post is the forth post in the "Web 2.0 for dummies" posts, based on my Web 2.0 presentation in a conference. The following image depicts the Meme map build in O’ reilly ’s brainstorming. This is the first and original Web 2.0 Meme map. It should be noted that the model is a developing model with no explicit boundaries. The central part includes the gravitational elements which are definitely the core of Web 2.0. The Web as a platform mentioned in the previous post is one of that gravitational elements and not just one of the elements but a very important element. The lower part in near to purple color includes principles, ideas and concepts. The upper part (dark green) includes services examples and principles related specifically to some of them. O’ reilly ’s model is not the only model. There are other Meme Maps. Analyzing and comparing different Meme Maps is beyond the scope of this post. However, the multitude of models together with the flexible boundaries enable...