SOA 2.0 by Guido Oswald

Complex Event Processing is too complex!?

2009-10-11T14:17:00.001-07:00

Progress Software conducted a study recently to figure out how far companies have gotten in terms of “operational responsiveness” in order to align with customers and verify that we are still in line with the demand.

Looks like THE most hyped topic at the moment is “Business Event Processing”, which is the same thing as Complex Event Processing, but sounds a little softer to the ears of business people (I guess).

Actually I truly believe that a Service Oriented Architecture (if done right) can easily be transformed to a Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and thus deliver a real competitive advantage. In the future IT will be real-time or near real-time (remember the business velocity theme?) , but key is the flexibility in which IT can adapt to new requirements. A well executed SOA is crucial and the foundation that allows all this to happen.

Bottom line: don’t fear the ‘complexity’ of CEP, but start laying the SOA foundation now to become as agile as the business requires it in the future…

Technorati Tags: Complex Event Processing,Business Event Processing,CEP,BEP,SOA 2.0

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Service Bus

2009-02-03T05:59:00.001-08:00

Forrester did evaluate the ESBs that are out there on the market and found Sonic ESB being the leader of the pack…

Although ESBs are seen more and more as a commodity, it is still the heart of an SOA. Depending on the requirements in terms of reliability, failover and performance, it makes sense to spend some time and money here. Customers should avoid a vendor lock-in or missing standards-support, etc.

When it comes to SOA 2.0, an ESB has to allow collaboration in development, deployment and operation. The more standards are supported, the better, when business partners or customers are looking to (re-)use some of the services connected to the ESB.

OpenSource can be an alternative if budget is tight (e.g. FUSE).

Technorati Tags: SOA,Enterprise Service Bus,ESB,Vendor Selection

Ten reasons for SOA adoption

2009-01-21T02:59:00.001-08:00

Hariharan put together a good list of reasons that support the decision towards an SOA:

Long-term vision and business strategy to align your business process and IT systems
Aquisitions and Mergers
Modernize your IT infrastructure and business systems
Quick changing Business Processes
Integration of Silos
Standard based approach
Decouple your application business logic
Best ROI for your IT investment
Interacting with many third party vendors and partners
Better control managing your service infrastructure

Technorati Tags: SOA 2.0,SOA Adoption,Reasons for SOA

Service Reliability

2009-01-19T05:13:00.001-08:00

This morning I was looking for a radio clock that can connect my iPhone and my first stop was the Digitech website as their prices are usually very good. I was getting one Page Load Error after the other until I gave up and went to their shop in Dietikon.

It turned out that not only their website was down, but their whole ordering and payment system had massive issues. Given that Digitech has no large shops (the shops are mainly stocks with a counter to pay…) these problems will probably cost them a whole lot of money - at least I went to the competitor cross the street and bought there…

Such an example dramatically shows the need for Monitoring and Problem Tracing Tools in crucial IT systems within a corporate. Products like Progress Actional can monitor IT infrastructure environments and trace down problems quickly. The time to resolve issues is massively reduced and (financial) risk is minimized.

BTW, while writing this, the shop homepage came up again – looks like they finally fixed it :)

Technorati Tags: Service Monitoring,Problem Resolving,Problem Tracking,IT Infrastructure,Risk Management,Business Transaction Security

Database backup into the cloud

2009-01-12T03:25:00.001-08:00

Oracle now offers to backup critical data into the cloud which will increase performance (according to Oracle). See here and here.
Integration to Amazons S3 is already available.

Is this direct competition to EMCs efforts or more support for them?

Customer experiences will show how issues like SLAs and Security are handled…

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Oracle,Amazon,S3,EMC

Blog from my iPhone...

2009-01-11T06:16:00.001-08:00

I wonder if the app will let me chose the blog...

Is SOA really dead ?!

2009-01-07T03:18:00.001-08:00

According to Anne Thomas Manes it is - but it is weird to say that the focus was to technical (rather than architectural) and then stating that services is the right way to go now.

Isn't that actually a step back to a technology focused way of seeing it? Isn't SOA the big picture that we're missing?

I agree that many projects fail because of the overall architecture not being consistent. But I do believe that SOA is still the right way to go. We just have to keep in mind that we are just at the beginning of the journey and all this is just now getting (kind of) mature...

In my eyes the creation, integration and publication of services (even in Cloud Computing) can - and should - still be based on an SOA. So maybe the name will change, but the architecture will survive.

In 2009 the economical crisis will force the industry to focus on quick ROI and therefore the projects will get smaller. The 5-year-ahead-planning days are gone. But still SOA can deliver value in these environment and maybe this is even a good thing, as the number of failures will be reduced.

referring to : http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live-services.html

Technorati-Tags: SOA 2.0,Services

SOA Predictions for 2009

2009-01-07T02:13:00.001-08:00

InfoQ has published a good article, collecting predictions where SOA will go in 2009:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/12/soa-predictions-2009

I especially like the phrase "SOA Gets Cloudy" - hope it will happen in 2009...

Technorati-Tags: SOA 2.0,Predictions 2009

It's All About the Data...

2008-11-22T07:32:00.001-08:00

(cross-post)

This article from Bill Snyder shows that in many SOA projects the data and its structure does not get the attention that it should.
For a working 360° view of a customer - something that Amdocs is propagating for years now - many data silos must be integrated and made accessible within an SOA. It is not only about (business) processes and services, the data is as important, especially when it comes to CRM.
In a CRM 2.0 strategy, the data and its availability is crucial. Customers expect all data (and services) to be available whenever and wherever they need it. There is no real personal treatment of customers without a 360° view of their data.
How can this be achieved?
One possible solution is a shared information datamodel (SID) or an existing standard datamodel like TMFs structure. This can either be used by all SOA services or be mapped to them individually (legacy apps).

Technorati-Tags: SOA 2.0,MDM,SDM,SID

SOA 2.0 and SOA Governance

2008-11-07T07:56:00.001-08:00

While I am reading through articles around SOA Governance and Registry / Repository, I keep thinking that this might be the first and most important part for collaboration in an SOA.

A Registry / Repository (I love the Repistry expression) is THE central place for all information around an SOA architecture. This is the place where developers need to communicate and collaborate amongst each other and with designers, architects and even customers / partners.

Wouldn't this be the most valuable place for Web 2.0 techniques within an SOA implementation?

Isn't it crucial to engage all participating parties to share information and leverage the tools that the Web 2.0 offers?

Technorati Tags: SOA 2.0,Repistry,Registry,Repository,collaboration,communication

SOA 1.0 + EDA = SOA 2.0 ??

2008-10-20T08:22:00.001-07:00

It looks like Gartner has a different interpretation of SOA 2.0...

In my context SOA 2.0 is of course the merger between SOA and the Web 2.0. It is interesting to see this definition, though. It highlights the importance of realtime which ultimately allows to react to any type of event much faster than by using a data warehouse and any sort of BI.

But is this a reason to promote it to version 2.0?

Progress Software has a leading tool for Complex Event Processing (Apama) that gains more and more visbility within the installed base of SOA customers.

So let's see how the term SOA 2.0 will be defined in the future. Maybe I should call my blog SOA 3.0 or SOA 2.5? We'll see :)

Technorati Tags: SOA 2.0,Gartner,CEP,EDA

Giles Nelson about SOA and Enterprise 2.0

2008-09-02T02:05:00.000-07:00

...touching the enterprise 2.0 without using the name specifically.

http://www.vnu.co.uk/vnunet/video/2223500/progress-software-explains-soa

...coming soon

2008-08-28T08:34:00.001-07:00

give me some time to get started in my new job at Progress Software - will probably cross-post some stuff from the CRM 2.0 blog...