SOA Point of View PoV market Positioning

Mark Skilton
Jul 5, 2007
5 min read

SOA is an overarching design strategy to transform business and IT through service orientation.

SOA is a way of describing the physical capabilities of an organisation as a logical set of business and IT services. By logical services we mean the definition and operation of business processes and IT resources described and used independently from the physical hardware, applications, data, network and IT operations.

SOA is at its most elementary is a way of describing a set of business and IT capabilities that are offered as services to a set of consumers. The service providers are owners of the business and IT capabilities. The capabilities are specified using a language and operating model that makes them independent from the way the services are used by consumers. The only condition is the service contract that defines the service levels and conditions of use of the service with no reference to specific underlying technologies.

Finding the size of the (transaction) service you need to compete with is the critical design choice in SOA.

What are these, how are they constructed and how they perform are central design issues for successful SOA adoption and continued management of services in an SOA.

Competitive advantage is at the composition and access ownership ends of business and IT today.

Make, buy, reuse is the three choices of investment, SOA introduces the third option but also changes the basis of the make and buy options by commoditising the build and acquisition of services.

The consumer producer paradigm of SOA is moving more to a buyer and seller model but the positioning of vendors in this space is different

Infrastructure- network centric
Infrastructure – server and storage centric
Information centric
Integration centric
Application platform centric
Compositional tool centric

Dynamics of exchange

Decreasing time transact
Increasing intelligence
Increasing service power
Right composition
Right choice of technology
Flexibility

History

Evolution of abstraction
Specific to declarative code languages
Proprietary to open mediation protocols

Quotations

A system and its boundaries are always part of or impacted on by other systems. Everything is essentially in dynamic movement; static model views of a system are at best a measurement at a point in time. Factors as variables outside of the system affect the wellbeing of the system in total.

Observation of Climate Change, Lake Superior – the largest inland freshwater lake in the world has a surface temperature of +2.5C from the last 10 years, with a drop in 30 inches, the largest since records began in 1923.

SAP and Oracle move to a new battlefield

The Wall Street Journal June 5 2007

SAP, Oracle Move to New Battlefields

By Leila Abboud in Paris and Vauhini Vara in San Francisco

Word Count: 892 | Companies Featured in This Article: SAP, Oracle, Lawson Software, Microsoft, Salesforce.com

For years, SAP AG and Oracle Corp. battled head-to-head to sell software to the world's largest corporations. Now, they are fighting on a different landscape as they seek to win new customers from the ranks of small and midsize businesses.

Competition in the midmarket is just now heating up and new products are on the way, so it is too early to determine whether one company may emerge as dominant. But an early snapshot, based on a survey of small and midsize companies, indicates that California-based Oracle is getting better reviews from customers in areas such as on-time completion and ...

Trends and Directions

Operationalising SOA investments through operations

Through the portal (SOA Knowledge Exchange Community, Past SOA Newsletters, etc), I found out that SOA's or pieces of a SOA have been written about by folks from CSC's Federal Consulting Practice, Philadelphia Diversified Practice, CSC Switzerland; CSC Australia, CSC Norway; CSC UK, LEF, and CSC Global. Most of these papers or presentations describe the expected benefits associated with implementing a SOA, but I didn't see much in regard to the actual benefits or lessons learned from implementing and maturing a SOA.

I'm seeking information about the ACTUAL IMPLEMENTATION and MATURATION of a SOA in order to answer a RFI we received from the USAF. More specifically, I would like information from any CSC entity has experience with:

1. Maturing a SOA once the basics are in place;

2 Integrating COTS to SOA to deliver new functionality or capability;

3. Sprial development approaches for SOA;

4. Integrating an ERP with a SOA;

5. Reducing operations and sustainment costs as a result of using SOA;

6. Scaling an existing SOA-based infrastructure for a significantly larger and more diversified user base;

7. Lessons learned

Any information you can provide -- including SOA past performance quals [do not limit to North American Operations], "SOA Thought Leader" POCs, etc - that will help me respond to the RFI will be greatly appreciated.

Jan Kinner, June 07

SOA Metrics

5 June 07

BEA developing SOA metrics and measures

Rob (et al)—

Got one note from SAIC based on your efforts, sent material, but has not heard anything. Will follow up.

I think we’re coming up with something that should be usable by and useful to Program Managers and Chief Architects.

The metrics/indicators provide a guide for Chief Architects or Program Managers tasked with building / composing SOA-based systems. They are intended to cover a large part of the development/evolution life cycle – requirements through deployment and evolution. They should identify measures (characteristics of the application and technology) or other indicators early enough in the life cycle to influence success in later stages (Predictive Metrics). This questionnaire (once more) seeks your input on their validity and feasibility.

The package consists of 3 documents. The first, is an introduction. The second, an Excel spread sheet, allows you to insert values for various aspects of your project (at whatever point in the life cycle you’re completing it). It will compute “red, yellow, green” indicators for various aspects of the project. The third is an Appendix that provides the scaling factors used to select red, yellow, or green indicators.

As before, we’d appreciate comments on:

• The usefulness of the metrics in identifying potential problems;

• Additional measures and metrics that might be useful -- suggest deleting any that you think have little impact or or moving it to contribute to a different goal or metric;

• General suggestions about clarity, appropriateness to the metric, ease (or difficulties) in collecting data, and other useful measures. for the metric in question

• the evaluation scales (in Document 3, the Appendix) and on the color ratings.

Do spend a little time playing with the spreadsheet. Enter what you think are appropriate measures and see if the color ratings come out as expected. The ranges are largely explained in the Appendix.

I am looking forward to hearing from you and think you’ll find this a lot closer to a final product than previous versions.

John Salasin

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) jsalasin@nist.gov

Web 2.0 the last mile of SOA

5 June 07

Attached are some recent articles and case studies that you may find of interest. The first article is authored by our Chief Technologist, Bob Buffone titled: “Enterprise Web 2.0 Solves the Last Mile of SOA”. The second article is from Nikkei Computing and it highlights the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi’s deployment of Nexaweb for a FOREX trading system. The Case studies cover customer implementations of Nexaweb at Jefferies, Aflac and Ameripath.

Joe Schramm JSchramm@nexaweb.com