SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : Number One in Web 3.0 by Matthew Loop
A prominent venture capitalist recently remarked, "Once a social operating system takes over a country, it's like it becomes the native language of that country." What social operating system was being discussed? The online social network Facebook, which has displaced MySpace and Friendster as the "in" place to hang out, hook up with friends, and express yourself in the online universe.
If you want to market to Facebook's cutting-edge users, you'll need to learn to speak their language and be part of their world, and we'll get to just how you accomplish that soon. However, you first need to understand exactly why all the marketing big boys are fighting to be a part of Facebook. Just what does Facebook mean to today's internet anyway?
Facebook, becoming dominant in North America and Western Europe, is taking hold all over the world. The site is not just important because it's popular - it's also a prime example of the possibilities of the semantic web, or Web 3.0, the next evolution in the internet world.
Why else would Microsoft pay an amazing two hundred and forty million dollars for a small piece of this pie? Why else did Google and Yahoo! fight for their own chance at Facebook glory? These computer giants know Facebook is the Next Big Thing, and that Facebook's use of its own operating system within the site will change social networking and internet marketing forever.
Internet users also recognize Facebook's uniqueness, and are responding to it in droves. It started when Facebook invited outside companies and developers to create tools for Facebook in exchange for a share in the advertising revenues. That was in May, 2007.
Over the next six months, Facebook users have been introduced to over five thousand new free applications - every day there are new "toys" and ways to share information with friends. With this massive array of things to do, and such a mellow environment in which to do it, it's not surprising an average of two hundred thousand new users are joining Facebook every day.
What's the secret to marketing to all these attractive new faces on Facebook? Well, you don't have to pay a couple hundred million like Microsoft - and you don't have to develop your own killer app for a Facebook tool. All you have to do is use a special automated system that does all your work for you, while you sit back, relax and work on continuing to manage and build your business.
What does the work? A Facebook Bot such as the Stealth Friend Bomber, Facebook Edition. This Facebook Friend Adder can put you kin touch with over fifty million new possible customers. The Stealth Friend Bomber automatically generates Mass Facebook Friend Messages, Pokes and Requests, marketing you across the hottest gathering in cyberspace while you're busy doing something else.
Facebook is the new language of the internet - and Stealth Friend Bomber, Facebook Edition is the kind of Facebook marketing software you need in order to speak that language.
About the Author
Explode business profits instantly with the premier Facebook Friend Adder on the planet! This cutting-edge Facebook Bot allows you to attract boatloads of traffic and paying customers every day. Download the free demo today!
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=677787
31 March 2008
Number One in Web 3.0
Web 3.0 Marketing's Biggest Player
SOA Articles : Web 3.0 Marketing's Biggest Player by Matthew Loop
Anything Microsoft would pay 240 million for just over one and a half percent of has to be a pretty big deal. And that pretty big deal, in which the computer behemoth triumphed over Yahoo! and Google, officially certified Facebook's status as the hottest online social site around. And because of the Microsoft payout, Facebook has a value estimated at 15 billion
What is it? It's Facebook, the hugest potential opportunity for internet marketers who need to keep up to speed with Web 3.0 and the semantic web explosion. Facebook's one-of-a-kind social network is seen as the vanguard of entirely new operating systems that, unlike Windows, exist only on the internet rather than on your computer. It's an online community that a fresh, new mass of internet users, just discovering this innovative virtual environment, is flocking to in droves just to find new friends to Poke - and, in the process, creating a whole new dynamic marketing base.
It also is a first step towards fulfilling the elusive quest for a web semantic standard. Facebook's unique online community with its pioneering communication layering and over five thousand free killer apps that allow users to play and interact with each other is a new step forward in virtual socializing.
Facebook's fun online community is rapidly becoming like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering more and more users, who in turn attract their friends, none of whom want to miss out on what everyone's talking to. And it's ending up, after three and a half years of a relatively quiet existence, as the New Big Thing in cool internet content, thanks to Facebook opening the site up to the creation of lots of fun new applications by outside developers.
So forget Friendster and keep watching MySpace deteriorate into MySpam, the millions of Facebook friends is a whole new attractive group of millions and millions ready to be marketing to in a whole new way. But how do you take advantage quickly - and tap your marketing operation seamlessly into that massive Facebook database? And do it in a painless automated way, leaving you free to continue to manage and expand your business?
How does the smaller internet marketer compete with the resources of a Microsoft in getting a piece of the Facebook action is the big question, however. Fortunately, there's an answer that works
One of the most effective software packages is the Stealth Friend Bomber, Facebook Edition. Stealth Friend Bomber will automatically generate Mass Facebook Friend Requests, Messages and Pokes to users all across the Facebook site. This stand-out among Facebook tools does everything you need and more to stay on top of the site that's experiencing a rate of explosive growth that's quickly leaving other friendship sites in the dust.
Web 3.0 sites like Facebook are the future of the internet - so the future of internet marketing also lies in Facebook. Stealth Friend Bomber (Facebook Edition) can make you and your business a part of the action.
About the Author
Hurry and get your hands on the only Facebook Friend Adder on the market! Double your income and marketing results in no time with this premier multipurpose Facebook Bot. Be a part of the Web 3.0 semantic web revolution.
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=675693
The Face-Off Over Facebook and Web 3.0 / Semantic Web
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : The Face-Off Over Facebook and Web 3.0 / Semantic Web by Sam B. Goldberg
The answer is the hottest online social activity site, the vanguard of Web 3.0 and the semantic web revolution, Facebook. Facebook, which is three and a half years old, has seen its popularity explode in recent months - and the business community is desperate to get a piece of it.
Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google reportedly were locked in a bitter behind-the-scenes battle over buying a prominent piece of Facebook - with Microsoft left standing victorious with a 1.6 percent stake for an astronomical price of two hundred and forty million dollars - shooting up the total Facebook value to roughly fifteen billion.
Why the big payday for Facebook? Microsoft is afraid of losing control of the next generation of computer users, who make up a big part of Facebook's user base. With Google's aggressive internet marketing presence becoming a fact of life, Microsoft has no choice but to throw cash at Facebook so it won't be left behind. Kevin Johnson, president of the platforms and services division at Microsoft, called the epic deal a "major advertising syndication win for Microsoft."
Of course, Facebook is also a big winner, as the company continues to grow at an exponential rate. Within the next year, Facebook's workforce will double as it pushes beyond North America and Western Europe and sets its sights on world domination. A new advertising system is also reported to be in Facebook's future, because, according to Facebook chief revenue officer Owen Van Natta, "We were very fortunate to have a lot of folks interested in a partnership with us around advertising."
What makes Facebook the biggest, hottest attraction to online marketers today? First of all, Facebook's unique social networking interface, currently with fifty million active members and adding two hundred thousand more a day, is at the forefront of the Web 3.0 movement - operating systems that work not on your computer, but entirely online. Also, the over-five thousand free Facebook tools developed for the site since May of 2007 make it a fun, playful and cheap diversion for users and their friends. Anyone who's enjoyed a Super Poke from a pal or spent hours trying to guide Jetman through an endless underground cave can testify to that.
Of course, major players like Microsoft and Google aren't interested in a friendly Superpoke. They're in it for the money, so clearly they believe there is a huge amount of it to be made on Facebook. But with computer biz giants throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at Facebook, how can individuals and smaller marketing firms avoid being priced out of the market for internet marketing's newest must-have tool?
Luckily for the little guy, there is hope. The Stealth Friend Bomber, Facebook Edition is a new, innovative and highly effective Facebook marketing tool. This simple software is totally automated, using a Facebook bot called a Facebook Friend Adder to deliver your message to the Facebook masses via Mass Facebook Friend Pokes, Messages and Requests. Suddenly, your business is part of the Facebook community, marking to an audience of millions.
With Facebook clearly emerging as the new standard for both technology and the marketing on the internet, the challenge is clear. Savvy marketers need a set of software tricks tailored to reaching the millions of users of the internet's hottest and fastest-growing social network.
About the Author
Easily drive boatloads of highly qualified visitors to your website with our new, incredibly rapid Facebook Friend Adder! Turn your yearly salary into your monthly income with this premier Facebook Bot. Try it at no-charge NOW!
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=675558
29 March 2008
Can You Have SOA without IT?
SOA Articles : Can You Have SOA without IT? by Melissa Peterman
There have been recent conversations whether a Service Oriented Architecture ( SOA) could replace an IT department of an organization. The answer is no. It is common to put SOA governance and IT in the same basket but the two don’t have that much in common.
SOA is an architectural style with a goal to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents, helping to manage business services, whereas IT governance is focused on managing technology.
For example, SOA is like owning a burger franchise that is also like the other burger franchises, anyone can go to the different burger places and expect to get the same thing, but at different locations. Everything is great as long as the service is running smooth. If there is a bump in the road, say the burger recipe for all of the stores went missing, they would need to call in an expert, (IT help) to find a solution. Once the recipe was found, (the bug fixed by the IT person), the SOA system would then continue to run fine, but IT is an essential part of the SOA ebb and flow. Granted, imagine if an IT person was the only one who manually made sure that each transaction within each burger franchise went smoothly? It would be a burger franchise disaster. Therefore, a service oriented architecture helps keep all burger franchise systems working smoothly with an IT person on call. Can businesses save money by purchasing an SOA system in conjunction with their current system?
Businesses can save money with an SOA system and scale down their current IT department but not remove the IT department all together. In fact, business processes are only streamlined by having the two together. According to a recent report, in 2007, companies spent $1.4 million on SOA. The report found in a survey among IT executives from China, US and Germany that 22% claimed faster speed and less risk was the main reason to get an SOA , 18% claimed reduce IT costs and %17 claimed reuse. An SOA provides all of these things and more. You could say that an SOA is enterprise governance only, not governance over IT. With the two together, businesses are finding so many ways to reorganize, restructure and reuse their current database and in turn create profits.
About the Author
About the author:Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity. For more information about SOA go to Mark Logic.
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=836187
Integrating Six Sigma With Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
SOA Articles : Integrating Six Sigma With Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by Tony Jacowski
Businesses need to realize the fact that SOA works well only when it is integrated with time-tested quality improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma.
For proof, they just need to look at the work records of businesses that are reaping the benefits of SOA after integrating it with Six Sigma concepts and methodologies.
The Integration Process
SOA basically deals with the planning, conceptualizing and designing of new customer oriented services from scratch in line with organizational goals and objectives. This is why the success of SOA depends a lot on the decisions made by management during the initial stages of SOA implementations. Since SOA does not provide for the necessary checks and balances, it has to depend on highly effective Six Sigma methodologies such as Design For Six Sigma (DFSS).
DFSS may not have been originally designed for use with SOA, but still it helps because it ensures that all decisions related to the design and development of new services are made on the basis of sound logic and verifiable scientific and statistical theories. Explained below are the five phases involved in the Six Sigma and SOA integration process.
Define: In this phase, DFSS helps in defining the goals and objectives of the SOA implementations. When SOA goals and objectives are set using DFSS, the chances of failures get automatically reduced, something that is quite necessary, considering the fact that the set goals and objectives will ultimately have a direct bearing on customer satisfaction levels.
Conceptualize: The conceptualization phase, which involves plenty of innovation on part of the developers, is made easy with DFSS, as it helps the developers to design the best possible services with the available human and financial resources. If DFSS is not applied in this phase, it could easily lead to project delays due to indecisiveness on part of the developers.
Design: In this phase, DFSS helps in charting out the design details of the newly conceptualized customer oriented service. Elaborating on the details helps the SOA implementation team to understand the rationale behind the new service design and how it can be used for satisfying customer needs and expectations.
Validate: If DFSS is used right from the first phase, it is highly unlikely that the SOA initiative will fail to deliver the desired results, but since the probability of errors can never be denied, it makes sense to conduct the validation process. If the SOA initiative passes the validation test as specified by DFSS, then it can be given the green signal for organization-wide implementations.
Control: In this phase, DFSS plays the role of a manager and a controller so as to ensure that the desired results are achieved through the SOA implementations. DFSS is based on the concept of continuous improvements, something that it passes onto SOA so as to make it just as effective and efficient.
SOA certainly holds great potential, especially for businesses that rely heavily on the use of technological infrastructure. By integrating SOA with Six Sigma, businesses can easily unlock the inherent potential of SOA and transform themselves into highly efficient organizations.
About the Author
Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution's Six Sigma Online offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=819538
23 March 2008
Enterprise Content Management and Service Oriented Architecture
SOA Articles : Enterprise Content Management and Service Oriented Architecture
Visualize the following scenario: All enterprise content (wherever generated by whatever entity) goes into a single repository and users can receive different services (that they were receiving from different applications earlier, or are completely new services) from an integrated system with a standard front end. Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Application Integration, and Data Warehousing work to make this scenario a reality.
Data warehouses, unlike transactional databases, are designed to facilitate querying and analysis. They are separated from transactional databases so that the latter are not burdened with query/analysis processing requests. These kinds of requests tend to use the processing resources, slowing down transaction processing response times.
Enterprise Application Integration seeks to integrate the different applications to eliminate duplication of both content and processing operations.
This article explores how Service Oriented Architecture works.
The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
This style of architecture groups functionalities into specific service groups. The services are provided to manage business processes that support an organization's business.
The enterprise-wide system is structured as a collection of standard services that different applications used by employees, suppliers, and customers need. These different applications might even be working on different platforms and coded in different programming languages. Each service is designed to work with any application that calls it, and would not know which application would call it. Its role is to provide a defined service in a standard way to whatever application calls for it.
The pool of services can be configured to create new applications if needed. This kind of architecture adds flexibility and quicker deployment to content management systems.
Available services are listed in a service registry that can be looked up by applications for calling the service they need. The services would come with any attached security requirements appropriate to the service.
In an ideal system, one service or another would cater to every kind of information management need, and there would be a standard look and feel for the interface. Additionally, information management would be customizable to the requirements of the organization's business processes.
Internet Protocols and SOA
Internet Protocols work independent of platforms and programming languages and work on the service request and delivery model. For example, a user client might request a certain document and the server complies with the request by retrieving the document and sending it to the client.
This makes the web-services approach a good Service Oriented Architectural approach. You can make your existing applications web enabled to start building a SOA system.
All services are described in XML documents that are independent of platforms, and written in Web Services Description Language (WSDL). An XML schema enables communication among the services.
A web service is not the only technology that can be used by SOA. SOA is an architecture that can be implemented using different technologies.
Conclusion
Service Oriented Architecture makes it possible to convert even legacy applications into services that any application can call. By configuring the services to cater to all kinds of information management needs, and tailoring the information management to the requirements of the particular business, you get to use enterprise knowledge to gain real control over business processes. This is what Enterprise Content Management systems seek to achieve.
About the Author: Based on user experience, Ademero's flagship product, Content Central™, is a browser-based document management software, document imaging software, and enterprise content management software that provides a convenient way to capture, retrieve, and manage documents and other content.
Source: http://www.easyarticles.com/article-120288.htm
Can You Have SOA without IT?
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : Can You Have SOA without IT?
There have been recent conversations whether a Service Oriented Architecture ( SOA) could replace an IT department of an organization. The answer is no. It is common to put SOA governance and IT in the same basket but the two don’t have that much in common.
SOA is an architectural style with a goal to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents, helping to manage business services, whereas IT governance is focused on managing technology.
For example, SOA is like owning a burger franchise that is also like the other burger franchises, anyone can go to the different burger places and expect to get the same thing, but at different locations. Everything is great as long as the service is running smooth. If there is a bump in the road, say the burger recipe for all of the stores went missing, they would need to call in an expert, (IT help) to find a solution. Once the recipe was found, (the bug fixed by the IT person), the SOA system would then continue to run fine, but IT is an essential part of the SOA ebb and flow. Granted, imagine if an IT person was the only one who manually made sure that each transaction within each burger franchise went smoothly? It would be a burger franchise disaster. Therefore, a service oriented architecture helps keep all burger franchise systems working smoothly with an IT person on call. Can businesses save money by purchasing an SOA system in conjunction with their current system?
Businesses can save money with an SOA system and scale down their current IT department but not remove the IT department all together. In fact, business processes are only streamlined by having the two together. According to a recent report, in 2007, companies spent $1.4 million on SOA. The report found in a survey among IT executives from China, US and Germany that 22% claimed faster speed and less risk was the main reason to get an SOA , 18% claimed reduce IT costs and %17 claimed reuse. An SOA provides all of these things and more. You could say that an SOA is enterprise governance only, not governance over IT. With the two together, businesses are finding so many ways to reorganize, restructure and reuse their current database and in turn create profits.
About the Author: About the author:Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity. For more information about SOA go to Mark Logic.
Source: http://www.easyarticles.com/article-121828.htm
20 March 2008
Besides Reuse, How Else Can Soa Bring an Organization Success?
Reuse ability is indeed one of the best things about an SOA service but how else can SOA improve businesses? Some SOA services provide businesses with enterprise search which enables organizations to query within their own contentbase, as well as manipulate and render content in a distributed environment. SOA services allow organizations unprecedented ability to integrate, access, use, and reuse their content in multiple ways across multiple channels.
Organizations can develop content applications that can access any of the services running on the SOA, including legacy applications that utilize an XML wrapper, ensuring that companies can migrate to a modern SOA-based publishing architecture while leveraging the full benefits of their existing platforms. For large publishing organizations, content heavy enterprises like government and insurance companies for example find great relief with an SOA structure.
Organizations can reap in profits from already existing content and also reduce costs with less money spent on IT. Businesses can save money with an SOA system and scale down their current IT department but not remove the IT department all together. In fact, business processes are only streamlined by having the two together.
So to answer the question, are there other reasons to purchase an SOA service? A straightforward yes to answer that question. SOA will deliver value to the business in multiple ways beyond reuse.
18 March 2008
SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East
Call For Papers Deadline: March 31, 2008!
SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East will take place on June 23-24, 2008 at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York.
Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have evolved over the past few years out of the original vision of loosely coupled web services replacing constrained, stovepiped applications throughout enterprise IT. Every major enterprise technology vendor today has developed its own SOA strategy, supported by innumerable mid-size companies and start-ups offering specific SOA aspects or entire solutions. This explosive growth in SOA technology is in response to a global demand--IDC estimates that spending on SOA services alone will grow from $8.6 billion to more than $33 billion by 2010.
SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East brings together the best minds in the business to New York for a two-day conference that offers comprehensive coverage of SOA and what it means to enterprise IT today. As Zapthink analyst Jason Bloomberg has noted, "SOA involves rethinking how the business leverages IT in many various ways." Attend SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East and learn from more than 100 speakers about how SOA is transforming business--and the way IT and business managers think about their businesses, processes, and technology.
The colocation of SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East and Virtualization Conference & Expo delivers the most relevant content to IT and business. Conference attendees will be able to choose from four great tracks at this year's event. Mix and match all you want, or slot into your favorite topic for the duration! The tracks include:
• Web 2.0/AJAX and SOA
• Interop Standards and Services
• Real-World SOA
• SOA Technology
• Virtualization
• Specially Selected Hot Topics
A Duo of Power Panels
This year's conference will also feature two Power Panels. Don't miss the SOA/Web 2.0/AJAX Power Panel, and Virtualization Power Panel. The Power Panels are FREE to all attendees, and will be recorded for broadcast by SYS-CON.TV.
Receive a Week's Worth of Education in Two Information-Packed Days!
The best news for this year's conference delegates is that the "Golden Pass" registration now provides full access to all conference sessions.
Additionally, after the conference we will mail you the complete content from all of the conference sessions in convenient DVDs. This on-demand DVD archive set is sold separately for $695. The DVD set includes all sessions from the simultaneous tracks that you can't attend in person.
17 March 2008
Model offers measure for SOA success - Part 2
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : Model offers measure for SOA success By Jon Bachman
Level 4: Measured business services
Want to compare network applications products? Visit the IT Buyer's Guides now.
Level 4 provides continuous feedback on the performance and business impact of the processes implemented at Level 3. The key focus at this level is collecting data and providing that data to business users, enabling them to transform the way they respond to events.
In our example, a Level 4 project could introduce logging and a service to monitor business activity. These functions provide a collection and display process for business managers to view their trade routing operation and for compliance officers to monitor trading behaviors of their staff and customers.
Level 5: Optimized business services
At this final level, business-optimization rules are added, and the SOA becomes the nervous system for the enterprise. Automatic responses to the measurements and displays of Level 4 allow an organization to take immediate action on events.
A Level 5 project can take the request messages entering the ESB and route that information to an event-stream processor. This service correlates the behavior of all traders across multiple execution venues and identifies important patterns. This information might be used to execute new trades or stop a rogue trader who is out of view of compliance officers.
The SOA Maturity Model provides a framework for IT and business users to properly evaluate the applicability and benefits of SOA in an organization.
Bachman is senior director of product marketing at Sonic Software. He can be reached at jbachman@sonicsoftware.com.
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/tech/2006/021306-soa.html?page=2
Model offers measure for SOA success - Part 1
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : Model offers measure for SOA success By Jon Bachman
Service-oriented architecture has emerged as the most significant shift in how applications are designed, developed and implemented in the last 10 years.
A consortium of software vendors and consultants recently introduced the SOA Maturity Model, which is designed to provide IT decision makers with a framework for benchmarking the strategic value of their SOA implementations and planning. The model is divided into five levels.
Read the latest WhitePaper - Wait-Time Analysis Method: New Best Practice for Performance Management
Level 1: Initial services
At the initial stage, an organization creates definitions for services and integrates SOA into methodologies for project development. In a financial-services environment, a Level 1 project may use an application server or an enterprise service bus (ESB) adapter to create Simple Object Access Protocol and HTTP Web service invocations between a management system that places an order and a trading service that accepts the order.
Want to compare network applications products? Visit the IT Buyer's Guides now.
Level 2: Architected services
At this stage, standards are set for the technical governance of an SOA implementation, typically under the leadership of the architecture organization. Standard SOA infrastructure and components, such as an ESB, a services and policies repository, an exception-management service, a transformation service and a single sign-on service, are used to foster greater reuse of services, as well as provide tight management and control of services across an organization.
Level 3: Business services and collaborative services
Level 3 features the introduction of business-oriented services, such as business process management (BPM). With a focus on the partnership between technology and business organizations, Level 3 optimizes the flexibility of business processes, allowing IT to respond quickly to changing business requirements.
For example, a Level 3 project utilizing BPM might use a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry to find a funds-transfer service that could significantly reduce settlement times. This service would be connected to the ESB process within hours of recognizing the business need.
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/tech/2006/021306-soa.html
14 March 2008
10 Steps to SOA Success
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : 10 Steps to SOA Success By Sandy Carter
For every service oriented architecture (SOA) success story, there lays an abandoned SOA project stuck in one of the various stages of deployment. Underscoring the successes and challenges of an SOA is the popularized theory that fifty percent of IT projects are deemed unsuccessful. This, of course, can make embarking on an SOA strategy rather intimidating.
Still, SOAs remain at the top of the executive and IT agenda based on their ability to more closely align technology with the needs of the business. Quickly dismantling the high statistics associated with IT project failures, SOAs have shown demonstrable ROI—so much so that the proven successes of SOAs have enabled this segment to swell to a worldwide market opportunity of $60.3 billion. This growth is up by 75 percent compared to 2005 when the market was estimated at $34.6 billion. Moreover, the SOA market is expected to skyrocket with an anticipated 54 percent continued growth through 2008 to reach $143 billion (Gartner).
Furthering the growth of the SOA market is the strategy's ability to pay for itself quickly. In fact, the number of opportunities for quick return on investment can be surprising. For example, many organizations are unaware of the number of duplicate processes that occur in separate departments and applications—and how much these duplicate processes are costing them. When you examine the costs and lost revenue attributable to redundant function and duplicated effort, you begin to see the value of centralized services over having to manage multiple competing and overlapping functions.
Still, there are some watchers out there asking, 'how can SOA succeed where previous approaches have failed?' and 'how do I avoid becoming a statistic?'
These are powerful questions. Simply stated, a successful SOA strategy can be achieved because the standards, best practices, and governance models have finally matured to the point where reuse can actually work. After all, SOA is, by definition, an architecture as well as an approach to IT that can help solve immediate business challenges.
Although each company has different business needs and each industry faces its own set of challenges, there are common issues that can lead to the failure of an SOA. The ten most prevalent are:
- Secure executive sponsorship: Before presenting how you'll ensure your company's SOA success, be prepared to demonstrate successes and failures of other companies on their path to SOA and articulate how you'll emulate proven practices and avoid pitfalls.
- Align the troops: Converse to overcoming the obstacle of executive support for your SOA is the challenge of aligning your organization to work and think in new ways. To do this, identify and recruit critical champions for each part of the business who will support and even evangelize the SOA efforts.
- Consolidate views: Eliminate the multiple views of information that are currently floating across your organization so that you are only looking at a singular, comprehensive, and consistent view of the business.
- Reuse equals re-useful: Identify and maintain a repository of your current Web services to avoid duplication of efforts. You may be surprised how much work has already been done by different pockets of your organization.
- Integrate the silos: Although in theory many of today's IT organizations seek to integrate and avoid redundancies while maximizing their current IT investments, the reality is that extraordinary efforts are being spent on still trying to maintain different IT systems that co-exist but are not integrated. The penny wise, pound foolish approach to SOA simply does not work.
- Seeing the forest through the trees: Remember that an SOA is an architecture, not a combination of clumsily bundled together point products that need to be force fit. A true SOA is created with an open standards-based approach through four strategic stages: model, assemble, deploy, and manage.
- Hop on the Enterprise Service Bus: An ESB provides the much needed connectivity infrastructure that you can use to integrate services within an SOA. Together, SOA and an ESB help to reduce the number of complexity of interfaces, enabling you to focus on your core business issues, rather than on maintaining your IT infrastructure.
- Step-by-step: When the thought of rolling out an enterprise-wide SOA becomes overwhelming, remember that the best approach is to continually test and modify while rolling it out—first departmentally then slowly throughout the organization—to identify issues while adding to your arsenal of best practices along the way.
- Avoid the carpe diem approach: Remember that you're not building your SOA just for today or this year. This is an organization-wide approach to aligning IT with the needs of the business and must accommodate today's needs as well as those of the future. For example, be sure to include support for mobile and wireless devices as well as ensuring you have enough flexibility to support 'the next big thing.'
- Prevent the accidental SOA: Many organizations may discover that they have a healthy repository of Web services that will comprise the majority of their SOA, though don't believe that the SOA starts and ends with a collection of Web services. Remember that an SOA must go beyond Web services to support all of your business processes. It must also provide a flexible, extensible, and composable approach to reusing and extending existing applications and services as well as constructing new ones.
So, if you've been hesitant to initiate an SOA project this year, make it your New Year's resolution to better align your technology with the needs of the business and join the legions of developers driving revenue up and cost out of their companies. Follow these ten steps and you'll be on your way to success.
About the Author
Sandy Carter is the vice president for SOA and WebSphere strategy at IBM. As IBM VP, Sandy has worldwide responsibility for marketing, strategy, and channels. During Sandy's tenure, the WebSphere portfolio has grown 18% in 2005 over the prior year and is in its 26th consecutive quarter of growth. Her influence has significantly strengthened the WebSphere brand through IBM's acquisitions of Gluecode, Ascential, and DataPower Corporations, and she has led WebSphere to win seven industry awards.
13 March 2008
10-step program to SOA success
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : 10-step program to SOA success by Dave Chappell
Commentary--One of the best parts of my job is meeting with people to discuss their technology initiatives. In the past couple of years alone, I have traveled around the world several times and met with thousands of people at public SOA forums and in private gatherings.
This group consists of architects, developers, project leaders and CIOs--and they are at varying stages of adopting SOA, from just dipping their toes in the pool to full scale implementation.
The most rewarding thing for me is when I get a chance to engage in and facilitate a conversation with a room of people that includes those who have successfully completed SOA projects. Listening to these "pioneers" share their experiences, both positive and negative, with those still trying to figure out SOAs is an eye-opening experience.
Across all of these situations, and there have been many, I have noted a consistent set of themes which I have rolled up into what I will call the 10-step program to SOA success.
1) Who's Your Daddy? Very few CEOs or CFOs give a damn about SOA, architectures, ESB's, or any of that. Find someone on the business side of the house who is responsible for a top business imperative, convince them the project will make money and let them champion your cause. Without this, the next nine points don't matter.
2) Have a Vision. Be prepared to articulate your vision regularly and consistently. This seems like a "duh," but it's what helps you gain support from other teams, across departments, and from your upper management. You are putting an architecture in place that is going to prevail for decades to come.
3) Identify Attainable Projects. Armed with your long term vision, choose an initial project that has immediate value--one that you can accomplish within a few months. Nothing speaks louder than a successful project delivered on time and on budget.
4) Support the Business. Find the business initiatives that matter most and you will ensure that your SOA projects get the attention they deserve. These usually have to do with improving operational efficiency and/or increasing top-line revenue by attracting and retaining customers.
5) Flexibility Matters. Create flexibility through loosely coupled services that can be put together to form composite applications that automate business functions. A flexible infrastructure, such as an ESB and Eclipse-based tools, provides business processes that are capable of adapting to change as quickly as market needs dictate.
6) Networking is not Just for Salespeople. You have to establish corporate-wide support at all levels of the organization. Development teams, datacenters and business units will have to share data and business logic across processes that span traditional boundaries. This may seem like an unnatural act to some, but it's the only way to be successful.
7) Don't Lose Control. Establish strict governance procedures from the outset. With stringent government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, organizations need to be acutely aware and be held accountable for their book-keeping practices. In the software sense, this means monitoring, auditing, and reporting of daily business transactions. An out-of-control SOA may spell doom for the project and, much worse, it could cause damage to the company.
8) Don't Fear Change. Organizational changes are imminent in order to address cross-cutting issues that arise. For instance, these issues may include new areas of ownership for business processes that span application silos and new governance models to enforce policies. SOA is a corporate wide initiative and you need to be a team player to make everyone successful at it.
9) Learn as You Go. Nobody gets it right the first time. The first project or two provides tremendous insight into what works well, and what things can be improved. The successful aspects of each project should be recognized, captured and carried from one project to the next. These successful aspects may be software based or organizationally based.
10) The Best and the Brightest. Finally, create an SOA Center of Excellence--a team that will be responsible for addressing the new organizational issues surrounding the adoption of SOA. This diverse group, including architects, project managers, business analysts and, most importantly, someone from the senior executive team, will ensure that the priorities of the SOA project are constantly moving forward and delivering measurable results.
biography
Dave Chappell is vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic products at Progress Software.
Source: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6108621.html
12 March 2008
IBM SOA Conference 2008
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Conference : Impact 2008 SOA Conference, Las Vegas, 6-11 April 2008
Welcome to Impact 2008! This April, more than 6000 IBM Customers and Business Partners will come together to reset the pace for innovation.
Be among the first to get the hottest information on new technologies from business and technical experts from IBM, analysts, and companies like yours who have implemented SOA solutions. 220 customer speakers will share their SOA experiences. This annual conference on SOA and WebSphere offers unparalleled technical education about SOA and IBM thought leadership for LOBs, CIOs and practical application for users. From IT practitioners to senior business leaders, you'll get more from the one conference that brings it all together.
This year enjoy the new Tech Zone, delivering even more technical education! With 400+ Technical Sessions including SOA and Patterns, BPM Enabled by SOA, Process Integrity, Industry Services, Lessons learned and much more, it delivers real education value.
Expect more! New Customer Feedback track for hands on, immediate input with IBM Product designers!
11 March 2008
User-group study: Mainframes live on through SOA
SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : User-group study: Mainframes live on through SOA
Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE. By Chris Kanaracus
Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.
Mainframes such as IBM's System z are integral to SOA almost by default, since they contain a large portion of the world's business information, the study suggests. Thirty percent of respondents who work for companies with 10,000 or more employees said between 51 percent and 75 percent of their company's data is managed and stored on a mainframe, according to the study.
Meanwhile, nearly 23 percent of respondents said their company is undergoing a SOA project, and another third said a SOA is in the planning or consideration stages.
Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they are pursuing an enterprise-wide SOA, but in most cases the projects are confined to niche instances, such specific lines of business or divisions or within applications.
"Many of the applications that need to be SOA-enabled are mainframe applications," said Pamela Taylor, vice president of strategic development for SHARE and a solutions architect for a subsidiary of a Fortune 50 company. "System z tends to be absolutely critical to deployments."
While mainframes play a dominant role in hosting an enterprise's data, companies' interaction with that data faces constraints. At least 50 percent of the companies surveyed use hand-coded scripts to push mainframe-based data to other databases or platforms, according to the study. Such scripting is hard to maintain, particularly if the programmers who wrote it leave the organization, the study notes.
IBM has aligned System z with SOA.
The study notes that SOA can strain systems, such as through its use of XML-based messaging. "Rather than acquire more server hardware to attempt to address growing SOA performance issues, mainframes may represent a more cost-effective option for leveraging existing resources," the study states.
In turn, the abstraction layer a SOA provides can help enterprises more easily tap their existing mainframe applications and data, the study notes.
Sales for System z fell last year but IBM is banking on the launch of its next-generation mainframe in February.
Some 431 SHARE members responded to the survey, which was conducted by Unisphere Research. About 48 percent work for companies with 1,000 or more employees, and 26 percent of respondents' firms have more than US$1 billion in revenue.
Source: http://pcworld.about.com/od/webbasedapplications/User-group-study-Mainframes-l.htm
Thunderhead Positioned as Leader in Celent Report on Document Automation for Insurers
SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Thunderhead Positioned as Leader in Celent Report on Document Automation for Insurers
NewsvineCommentTop Analyst Firm Highlights Global Software Vendor's US Insurance Customer Base and Technology Innovation
Thunderhead, the leading provider of enterprise communications solutions, has been named in a recent Celent report, “Document Automation Solution Vendors for Insurers 2007,” as one of the industry’s leading vendors. The report, which profiles the US operations of several document automation vendors, differentiates Thunderhead NOW, the company’s document generation platform, from traditional players in the insurance industry by spotlighting its technology leadership and innovation.
Thunderhead NOW enables insurance companies worldwide to manage and deliver rich, multi-channel customer communications, empowering business users to improve time-to-value. With Thunderhead NOW, companies can also effectively maximize customer engagement and retention. Celent’s ABCD Vendor Comparison Model, a multi-dimensional graph, ranks vendors based on their product’s functionality, technology, number of customers and depth of client services.
Celent’s report and rating style suggest the Thunderhead NOW enterprise communications platform may provide superior flexibility for insurers. Its easy integration with an organization’s existing business process management (BPM) and enterprise content management (ECM) systems, as well as its leadership in leveraging XML and service-oriented architecture (SOA), illustrate the product’s “one-platform-for-all-communications” approach. This highlights its attractiveness to insurance companies of all sizes.
“Thunderhead has utilized XML and other open standards to create a very flexible and powerful document automation system,” said report author Jeff Goldberg, senior analyst with Celent. “The Thunderhead platform is intended to move document authoring out of the hands of IT and move the responsibility of creating content to content owners and design to designers. The Thunderhead approach provides an excellent opportunity to manage a brand strategy across all documents and channels.”
“Thunderhead’s large base of customers in the insurance industry must have access to the right tools for enabling personalized, multi-channel communications,” said Glen Manchester, chief executive officer of Thunderhead. “The Celent team clearly understands our positioning and the value of our open-standards approach, validating the way our platform separates presentation style from content. This helps with maintenance and enables multi-channel communication, which is critical in order to communicate with your customers effectively. We’re happy to be named in this very competitive industry as a leading vendor, and to be recognized by Celent’s experienced team of experts.”
Thunderhead was named to Software Magazine’s Annual Software 500 for 2007, which ranked the company as one of the world’s largest software companies. For more information on Thunderhead and its products, please visit www.thunderhead.com.
About Thunderhead
Thunderhead is the leading provider of enterprise solutions for the production of multi-channel business communications. Thunderhead delivers the only enterprise platform that enables business users to manage the end-to-end process of creating intelligent, personalized communications across multiple channels.
Due to its unique combination of business-user control, genuine open standards-based core, and enterprise capabilities, Thunderhead has quickly established itself as the clear market leader for financial services organizations. Thunderhead’s customer base includes many of the world’s leading insurance organizations, including Prudential, Allianz, West Bend Mutual Insurance and ICAT, and is serviced from offices located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Thunderhead is one of the world’s fastest-growing software companies, as recognized by Software 500 in the US and The Sunday Times in the UK.
For further information please visit www.thunderhead.com
Contacts:
for Thunderhead
Katie Eakins / Patrick Wallace, 619-677-2700
thunderhead@lewispr.com
Source: http://markets.about.com/about?GUID=4846700&Page=MediaViewer&ChannelID=3191
Software AG plans SOA alliance
SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Software AG plans SOA alliance
German business application vendor Software AG hopes to create an alliance of small European software vendors targeting the market for SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications and services. By John Blau
German business application vendor Software AG hopes to create an alliance of small European software vendors targeting the market for SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications and services.
"By bundling resources, many smaller software companies will be able to competeStreibich wants to establish a network of "niche" software companies that can share technical and marketing resources, and more. "What we're talking about is co-opetition," he said. "None of us can do it all alone but together we can develop competitive SOA offerings."
more effectively in this new SOA market," Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO of Software
AG, said Thursday during a news conference at the Cebit trade show in Hanover,
Germany.
Streibich likened his SOA alliance to the Star Alliance in the airline industry, which helps carriers compete on a global scale.
Analysts agree that company size and depth of expertise will be crucial to establishing a position in the SOA market.
"The SOA market is wide open but IBM, Oracle and SAP will be big competitors," said Gartner Inc. analyst Massimo Pezzini.
Software AG already has experience in collaborating with partners through its CentraSite Community. The community is focused on bringing together the individual SOA skills of partners in areas such as security and business intelligence.
CentraSite is a registry and repository system that keeps track of SOA artifacts, including Web services. CentraSite was developed jointly by Software AG and Fujitsu Ltd.
At Cebit, Software AG announced new CentraSite Community members, including Novell Inc. and Alfabet AG.
Software AG will collaborate with Alfabet in developing a new application for SOA planning and governance.
At Cebit, Software AG also demonstrated a new service, SOA Value Assessment, which is designed to help companies identify areas in which SOA can deliver business benefits.
The company is also showing its Active Governance Framework (AGF), announced in February, which features a policy editor for SOA.
With AGF, developers can edit and enforce business and technical policies.
Source: http://pcworld.about.com/od/industrynews/Software-AG-plans-SOA-alliance.htm
07 March 2008
Managed services for SOA by Sun
Sun SOA Service Oriented Architecture Services : Managed services for SOA
Sun Managed Services is a broad portfolio of dynamic, heterogeneous IT infrastructure and management offerings. This portfolio includes Service Definition Workshop, Managed Operations, Interim Operations Management, and much more. These services are designed to work with various delivery platforms, services, your preferred delivery partner and your own IT resources. We help you avoid vendor lock-in by standardizing our solutions on ITIL-best-practices and proven methodologies. Visit Sun Managed Services Capabilities.
Source: http://www.sun.com/service/soa/Support services for SOA by Sun
Sun SOA Service Oriented Architecture Services : Support services for SOA
Customers benefit from Sun Software Service Plans – Sun's comprehensive software support service offering of Sun for software. In addition, the SOA Support Services portfolio includes: Solution Support Engineering Service, and Dedicated Technical Support Engineer. Visit Sun Software Service plans or Sun Solution Support Engineering services.
Source: http://www.sun.com/service/soa/
Professional services for SOA by Sun
Sun SOA Service Oriented Architecture Services : Professional services for SOA
Sun’s professional services can help you assess, architect, implement, govern and audit your SOA environments. Sun offers comprehensive consulting services and utilizes established methodologies and expertise that help you take full advantage of Sun’s SOA products. Sun’s custom consulting services can be used to assist in the following areas: Solution pilot, Custom architecture, Custom implementation and System tuning. Visit Sun Professional Services for SOA for more information.
Source: http://www.sun.com/service/soa/
Learning services for SOA by SUN
Sun SOA Service Oriented Architecture Services : Learning services for SOA
Sun offers a comprehensive portfolio of training courses, workshops and custom learning solutions that are designed to help you and your staff acquire the skills and certification to implement and manage your SOA solution. In addition to web-based and in-class courses, Sun offers a wide range of training solutions to help you design, staff, train, and manage your SOA environment. Visit the Sun Java CAPS Course list and Sun Java Enterprise System Training Portfolio.
Source: http://www.sun.com/service/soa/
Get started today with end-to-end SOA service offerings from Sun
Sun SOA Service Oriented Architecture Services : Get started today with end-to-end SOA service offerings from Sun
At Sun, we want to work with you to understand your SOA challenges and business goals. Sun’s lifecycle services for SOA provide a continuum of expertise, technology, and global coverage for assessing your needs, then designing, deploying, and managing your SOA solutions. Our world-class portfolio includes services that help you maximize the full value of your SOA investment:
- Learning services
- Professional services
- Support services
- Managed services
Sun’s team of experts can help you learn, plan, implement, and manage a SOA solution to better leverage IT assets, do " more with less ", and increase the agility of your people, processes, practices and technology platforms.
Source: http://www.sun.com/service/soa/Sun Professional Services for Service Oriented Architecture
Sun SOA : Sun Professional Services for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Sun's SOA consulting services help you explore your SOA options, assess your environment for adopting a SOA solution, create a detailed plan that meets your business and technical requirements, and achieve implementation success.
Build an IT architecture that optimizes your SOA solution
Sun business integration solutions offer a completely integrated and flexible approach to building composite applications that align technology with business processes.
Sun consultants leverages proven architectural blueprints, solution accelerators and methodologies to develop an integrated end-to-end solution. Using years of architectural and implementation experience, consultants can help build your SOA solution with the robustness and flexibility to introduce new services faster and help you gain a competitive edge.
Sun Professional Service's SOA service portfolio offers a flexible SOA adoption framework that allows you to start your SOA evaluation by using a project approach that best fits your needs. Choose whether you want to approach your SOA strategy from a best practices approach, project-level approach, or from a review of you key business needs. This flexibility in our consulting framework allows you to tailor your implementation based on your particular migration path.
Services may include:
- Discovery Workshop
- Center of Excellence Solution
- Repeatable Quality Methodology
- FastTrack Service
- Go Live Assessment
- Solution HealthCheck
Service Oriented Architecture 2008 UK
SOA Conference 2008 : Service Oriented Architecture 2008 UK
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 - London, United Kingdom
Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre
Broad Sanctuary, Westminster
London, England
Description
The conference will enable end users to make knowledgeable decisions about where and when to use SOA Service Oriented Architecture, and will include end-user case studies and presentations from leading vendors and IDC analysts.
Homepage
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P15270
Source: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/414599/
Oracle Shakes Things Up with SOA-Based Data-Integration Suite
Oracle SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Oracle Shakes Things Up with SOA-Based Data-Integration Suite by Loraine Lawson
Oracle may have just moved from a data-integration challenger to contend as leader this week with the release of Oracle Data Integration Suite.
There isn’t much buzz yet about the announcement. You’ll find tons of news articles if you do a search, but let me save you some time: They’re almost all the same article, written by IDG correspondent Chris Kanaracus.
Here’s the basics: Oracle’s $60,000-per-CPU suite is a middleware solution, which merges traditional data-integration functions with service-oriented architecture tools. It bundles Oracle’s Data Integrator, a BI/data-warehouse solution with master-data-management capabilities, with the Oracle/Hyperion Data Relationship Manager and Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager.
You also get an ESB, (which are practically free with every Happy Meal these days), a business-to-business engine and a business-rules engine, according to the Kanaracus article. Non-standard add-ons are Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator, Oracle Data Profiling, Oracle’s Coherence Data Grid and various adapters. Tag, title and tax not included.
OK, so what does all that mean?
Vincent McBurney at IT Toolbox had this to say:
…a very interesting data integration suite from Oracle - the first vendor to put a business rules engine into a core data integration suite offering.
He compares each component to similar products from IBM and Informatica. Ultimately, he points out, Oracle’s success will boil down to how well the components actually work together.
While Kanaracus focused on how acquisitions contributed to the new suite, SearchOracle at TechTarget took a close look at how the suite handles data governance and integration in an SOA. And, not surprisingly for company known for its databases, that’s a key part of why Oracle’s Data Integration Suite is an intriguing offering.
In effect, Oracle is offering a middleware solution that offers SOA-based business-process management and change management and tying that to master-data management capabilities, which is where the Oracle/Hyperion Data Relationship Manager tool comes into play.
Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang told SearchOracle:
“What Oracle is trying to say is that in order for SOA to be successful, you need to have MDM in place. You also need to have the business processes and you also need to have some of the semantic rules built into all of that.”
Could this be the solution to SOA’s data dilemmas? Stay tuned.
Oracle also promises its solution will work in a heterogeneous environment, with support for IBM DB2, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and Oracle. As Kanaracus’ article notes, this is significant, since SOA capabilities in a heterogeneous environment has been one of IBM’s marketing tactics.
Obviously, Forrester and McBurney see this as a significant new offering. I’m curious to see what others say.
Last year, Gartner named Oracle a data-integration challenger and IBM a leader in its Data Integration Tools Magic Quadrant. I suspect this more robust offering may reposition Oracle in 2008.
Source: For more information on Oracle SOA Service Oriented Architecture News, please visit http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/mia/?p=309
Comprehensive SOA-Based Data Integration Suite Solves Data Challenges
Oracle SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Comprehensive SOA-Based Data Integration Suite Solves Data Challenges
Integrating data across multiple tiers just got a lot easier for Oracle customers. The new Oracle Data Integration Suite provides a comprehensive end-to-end data integration platform that connects heterogeneous data sources and applications and delivers clean, accurate, and timely data across the enterprise.
"Our customers need to manage data integration in three different tiers: the bulk delivery tier, the business process tier, and the application tier," says Jeff Pollock, senior director of product management, Oracle. Now they can manage them all with a single comprehensive and powerful end-to-end data integration solution—using a standards-based SOA framework."
Oracle Data Integration Suite couples leading technologies for service-oriented architecture (SOA) with conventional data management components like extract, load, and transform (ELT); data quality; data profiling; and master data management.
The suite combines Oracle's core strengths in SOA-based business process management and change management with Oracle Hyperion's Master Data Management capabilities. "Unifying these suite components allows people with very different roles in the company to view the integrated data that matters most to them," says Pollock. "Whether the person is a business user, an enterprise architect, a process modeler, or a data administrator, the Oracle Data Integration Suite gives them the tools they need."
"This comprehensive approach is critical for lowering total cost of ownership and reducing the need for support and maintenance for companies facing today's data integration challenges," says Pollock.
Oracle Data Integration Suite components enable consistent data integration across data sources and applications that include IBM DB2, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, Oracle Database, and Oracle and other ERP applications.
Availability and Pricing
Oracle Data Integration Suite is available at a base price of $60,000 per CPU, which includes Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, Oracle Application Server, Hyperion Data Relationship Manager, Oracle B2B Engine, and Oracle Business Rule Engine.
Oracle Data Integration Suite options are priced separately and include Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator, Oracle Data Profiling, Coherence Data Grid, Legacy Adapters, Applications Adapters, B2B Adapters, and Unstructured Content Adapters.
Source: For more information on Oracle SOA service oriented Artchitecture, please visit http://www.oracle.com/newsletters/information-indepth/fusion-middleware/mar-08/soa.html?msgid=6346828
06 March 2008
Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow ?
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Articles : Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow ? by Tom Baeyens
Introduction
Tony Bear says
the BPM-folks are from Venus and the WS-folks from Mars
That exactly summarizes a big division in the BPM industry that might not be obvious. The term BPM-folks refers to the people that focus on process modelling. Their starting point is the analysis of procedures that describe how people and systems work together in an organisation. In the modeller's view, the initial focus is not on technology, but on non-technical business analysts that documents how people and systems work together. For many of BPM projects in that category, automation of the processes is not even considered. The final goal is actually to create more insight in how an organisation works by documenting the core business processes. The pure play BPM products that come from this background aim to ease the automation of software support for such business process descriptions. I'll refer to this camp as the BPM modellers.
The WS-folks refers to the people that focus on creating executable processes. Executable processes are software artifacts that serve as input for Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Executable processes usually have graphical diagram representation. Currently, there is only one executable process language with adoption by big vendors and that is BPEL. BPEL is based on WS-* standards, that's why the people focussed on automation are termed WS-folks above. Service orchestration recently got a boost with the growing consensus around BPEL. I'll refer to this camp as the orchestration developers.
The thing that both movements have in common is the focus on a graphical diagram and inclusion of wait states. The diagram is an important instrument for both the BPM modellers and the orchestration developers. Diagrams have the ability to provide a very quick overview of a certain process. While this is a powerful instrument, be careful with that perceived simplicity. As diagrams that might look similar can have a very different meaning depending of the notation or of the underlying executable process language. Also the purpose of a diagram is a very important consideration. In case of the business analyst, the purpose of a process diagram is to help the explanation to another human. They help to bring the overview across and some level of vagueness is allowed. In case of the executable process languages, the diagrams are part of a process that specifies how a computer system must behave. So those types of processes are exact and have a very precise interpretation.
Inclusion of wait states is more technical in nature, but it is also found in both movements. If a business analyst draws a business process, different activities might relate to different resources. Some activities might translate into tasks for human people and other activities might translate into a piece of software that is executed on a computer system. When such a process is automated, the process engine drives the execution. This means that the engine internally might execute some of the activities automatically. Otherwise, in case the activity is performed outside the scope of the process engine, the process engine will need to keep track of the current state and wait until a signal is received from the external entity. For example, such an external trigger might be a user that clicks a button in a web application to indicate that a certain task is completed. Similarly, an ERP system might notify the process engine that the processing of a certain invoice is completed. The concept of wait states might seem a bit abstract and you might wonder why this is relevant in a discussion about workflow or process languages. It is an important aspect because traditional programming languages like Java don't have support for persistable wait states.
This article arguments that the gap between the analysis and the implementation of business processes is far bigger then the marketing of today's workflow tools might suggest. Also it will propose a much more realistic way of dealing with this situation. The current standards and initiatives will be explained with enough depth so that you can see how they relate to the movements and why. In the discussions, I'll identify the strengths and weaknesses of each discussed technology and describe the proper and improper ways of using them.
At the end, a new type of workflow technology is introduced called process component model. This type of framework can handle multiple process languages and it can support process languages that better support the transition from analysis process diagrams to executable processes.
Source: http://www.infoq.com/articles/process-component-models
Microsoft bets on Atom Publishing Protocol as the future direction for Web APIs
SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Microsoft bets on Atom Publishing Protocol as the future direction for Web APIs by Hartmut Wilms
Microsoft switches from the Web Structured, Schema’d & Searchable (Web3S) protocol to Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) for services offered by Microsoft's Live Platform on the Web.
David Treadwell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Live Platform Services, announces some news and updates on the Windows Live Platform Services. Under the topic "Standardization of frameworks and protocols" he states that
Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023)". At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.
AtomPub will also be used as the standard protocol for ADO.NET Data Services (codename "Project Astoria"). Pablo Castro writes about APP support in Astoria on the Project Astoria Team Blog.
Dare Obasanjo explains why Microsoft has changed its mind on APP and has obviously abandoned Web3S:
The fact is when we listened to the community of Web developers the feedback was overwhelmingly clear that people would prefer if we worked together with the community to make AtomPub work for the scenarios we felt it wasn’t suited for than Microsoft creating a competing proprietary protocol.
Microsoft's decision is welcomed by Mark Baker in his blog post on Web3s and Atom/APP:
I’m confident this is for the best. In addition to Atom/APP being existing standards (with an accompanying abundance of existing tooling), Microsoft will also gain the evolutionary advantages of the hypermedia as the engine of application state constraint, which Web3S opted to replace with a schema-driven application model.
Adapting the standardized Atom Publishing Protocol is in line with Microsoft's new interoperability principles, support for REST and Syndication in WCF, and the high extensibility and pluggability of the ASP.NET MVC Framework.
MomentumSI Releases new SOA Framework
SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : MomentumSI Releases new SOA Framework by Jean-Jacques Dubray
Jeff Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI, who has been a contributor to SOA since the early days, has focused on enabling the "Service Oriented Enterprise".
Yesterday, MomentumSI released the Harmony™ SOA Framework. The base framework is provided for free. Other frameworks have been published before with different scope and focus, such as the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology which focuses on B2B, the CBDI Service Architecture & Engineering Metamodel which focuses on some of the information captured during service construction, or the Praxeme Enterprise Methode (in English) which focuses on service identification and construction as part of business processes. The purpose of these frameworks is to define precisely the metamodel of a service oriented system -including a logical data model-, specify the organization, the processes, activities and deliverables that help create services and assemblies of services, as well as the technical foundation of service oriented systems from an Enterprise Architecture perspective. Overall they help structuring the decision process around service and service oriented infrastructure construction.
For instance, even capturing the metadata associated to a service to help design it, implement it, find it, manage it and operate it remains challenging.
MomentumSI's framework is based on 5 perspectives:
SOA Lifecycle & Work Patterns
SOA Technical Reference Architecture
SOA Governance & Organizational Model
SOA Maturity Model
SOA Business & Information Architecture (to be published)
MomentumSI's SOA lifecycle is composed of 9 phases, ranging from investigation, realization to operation, evolution and consumption. The Eclipse Process Framework can be used to managed SOA lifecycles and align it with existing Project and Software methodologies such as RUP, OpenUP...
The Technical Reference Architecture defines for instance, the SOA Infrastructure, the different class of services, security and Management & Operations.
The Governance model specifies the Governance Organization and the relationships with the Service lifecycles.
The Maturity Model describe in details the target levels of maturity for the enterprise architecture, the technology infrastructure, the methodology, and the operations.
Source: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/03/momentumSI-SOAF
