David Chappell Blog

• 
  
  Grid computing will grip the attention of enterprise IT leaders, although given the various concepts of hardware grids, compute grids, and data grids, and different approaches taken by vendors, the definition of grid will be as fuzzy as ESB.  This is likely to happen at the end of 2008.
  
  
• 
  
  At least one application in the area of what Gartner calls "eXtreme Transaction Processing" (XTP) will become the poster child for grid computing.  (see Gartner Research ID # G00151768 - Massimo Pezzini).  This "killer app" for grid computing will most likely be in the financial services industry or the travel industry.  Scalable, fault tolerant, grid enabled middle tier caching will be a key component of such applications.
  
  
• 
  
  Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) will finally become a well understood ingredient for achieving realtime insight into business process, business metrics, and business exceptions.  New offerings from platform vendors and startups will begin to feverishly compete in this area.
  
  
• 
  
  Service Component Architecture (SCA) will become the new way for SOA applications to be defined as support from all the major platform vendors (sans Microsoft) will be rolled out.
  
  
• 
  
  New lightweight containers models will become more prevalent, with continuing adoption of Spring, OSGi, and EJB3.
  
  
• 
  
  Web 2.0 applications will start to become more prevalent in enterprises.  Many initial successes of quick and dirty, Enterprise Mashups with attractive looking RIA style applications that include Flex, IM, and threaded discussion groups will be developed for useful business applications such as collaborative workflows.  The associated hype will leave some wondering why they are embarking down the path of long term SOA projects with similar goals in mind.
  
  
• 
  
  Some of those Web 2.0 applications will fail, with an important piece of the user interface just not showing up one day because one of the supporting feeds just isn't there any more.   The guy who mashed it up in the first place doesn't work there anymore, and many will be scrambling to figure out who is supposed to fix it, and who to point the finger at.
  
  
• 
  
  As a result, a renewed focus on governance will emerge.  Industry pundits and thought leaders who had previously been strong proponents of SOA governance will passionately start evangelizing the antithetical concept of building process and governance into the creation of enterprise mashups.
  
  
• 
  
   By end of year it will be clear that an understanding of infrastructure requirements for common problems such as predictable scalability, reliability, security, (*-ilities) will be necessary in order to support any combination of SOA, REST, or Web 2.0 style applications.  However the exact architecture or even the list of requirements in support of such infrastructure will not be well understood or agreed upon.  Such a common understanding will not come to bear until at least 2010.  This will be the new frontier to explore in the coming years.
  
  
• 
  
  Oh yeah, and Dave Chappelle will make a huge comeback this year, but without the $50M contract.  :)

This month I have once again teamed up with Dave Berry, Oracle's ESB Product Manager, to publish part 2 of an article exploring the "Next Generation Grid Enabled SOA".  This one is sub-titled "Not Your MOM's Bus".

Abstract: In our previous article we discussed how SOA grids can be used to break the convention of stateless-only services for scalability and high availability (HA) by allowing stateful conversations to occur across multiple service requests, whether between disparate service boundaries or load-balanced groups of cloned service instances.

In this article we will challenge traditional applications of message-oriented middleware (MOM) for achieving high levels of quality of service (QoS) when sharing data between services in an enterprise service bus (ESB). We will further compare and contrast a state-based, in-memory storage and notification model, and investigate the intelligent co-location of processing logic with or near its grid data in large payload scenarios. Finally, we will also explain when to substitute an SOA Grid for existing MOM technologies as driven by the following question: "If you have an SOA grid that can reliably hold application state data and the necessary systems can access it, why continue to utilize conventional messaging?"

Read More..

Cheers,
Dave

Oracle SOA Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, has been selected in the InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award  for "Best Enterprise Service Bus"

These products were selected from hundreds of IT products evaluated by InfoWorld's Test Center over the past year.  According to the award main page InfoWorld's annual Technology of the Year awards "recognize the most capable, most polished, most groundbreaking, and most valuable products on the IT landscape."

One of the cool things about these awards is that they downloaded the product, installed it and actually kicked the tires hands-on.  As a result, I view their evaluation as carrying a lot more weight than those who just look at a bunch of ppt slides and demos and don't try anything themselves.

In the press release InfoWorld's executive editor Doug Dineley is quoted as saying -

"The Oracle SOA Suite pulls together top-notch governance, business rules, security, and business activity monitoring into an ESB package replete with native BPEL orchestration and human workflow integration.  Ease of implementation and affordability make it a standout consideration,"

According to the writeup  that was done earlier in the year by InfoWorld's James Borck they also seemed to like what we had done to bring together the acquired technologies to round out the SOA functionality, as noted in the article - "Oracle SOA Suite culminates strategic merger-and-acquisition execution into a well-integrated product that is at once effective, usable, and highly extensible, making it a sure shot at reducing initial integration costs and benefiting management of your SOA infrastructure going forward."

Dave

There has been a fair amount of chatter lately about defending the value of SOA projects or justifying such projects to the "C-level".  Many of these discussions will point at the business value of doing more with less and achieving IT cost reduction by reducing redundant systems and reuse of services in a SOA.  Also streamlining processes in order to run the business more efficiently is a popular opinion, which I agree with. 

David Linthicum in his blog summarizes a few of the points - http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/2008/01/more_on_defendi.html

Delivering business value from SOA is not a new concept.  I have written a fair amount about the topic over the years: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6108621.html and http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2005/02/extracting_business_value_from.html. 

Today, similar to a few years ago, extracting business value from SOA and using SOA initiatives as a means for aligning IT with the business is critical.  Many of the same points are also relevant to "defending SOA" today.

To sum it up, I have always believed that the real business value of SOA is not so much about IT cost reduction but really about being able to react quickly to change.

• 
  
  Enterprises need the business agility to react to ever-changing business requirements, and continually implement new programs to attract and retain customers.


• 
  
  In support of this, business processes need to be automated, streamlined, refined, and measured.


• 
  
  The underlying IT infrastructure which supports those business processes need to be flexible and capable of adapting to change. Continued measurement of success means that the change needs to happen in real time and results need to be measured in real time.

Overall, the main business value of building a SOA is the ability to react quickly to changing business conditions including changing economic conditions.    During such times executives need to be at the helm more than ever.  Competitors will take drastic measures and you must be able to quickly alert, measure, and react, and measure again in order to quickly assess the effectiveness of your course corrections.  Having flexible business processes, which can be changed without requiring a considerable engineering effort, tied into realtime analysis and metrics made available through things like BAM dashboards can help tremendously in that type of dynamic environment.

I have always been a strong proponent of approaching SOA by identifying projects that can achieve demonstrable ROI within a matter of months, and that this needs to be accompanied by the longer term vision of where you need to get to in order to be successful.  This still holds true regardless of economic conditions or  IT budgets.

One could even argue that if you weren't already building SOA projects with these things in mind, then perhaps they were misguided to begin with.

Dave