SOA - Service Orientation Applied

Challenges/barriers for jumping on to SOA bandwagon for IT firms

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:35:34 +0000

Gartner predicts that by 2010, 80% of software revenue growth will come from SOA enabled applications. With such enormous potential, IT firms are constantly trying to ramp up their potential to deliver SOA as per their clients' need. SOA is a hard sell as it involves an intimate understanding of both the client's business and their IT landscape.

Gaps in the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture- Part I

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:52:40 +0000

Recently,in the context of a client request, I had a chance to look at the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture, described in this redbook. I found some critical gaps in the reference Architecture. I will highlight these gaps in this and subsequent blogs. The first gap is that the SOA Security Reference Architecture, does not consider an Independent Chain of Command for managing Security Policy. The second gap is that it does not explore the use of right architectural building blocks to enable externalization of Security policies outside of applications, portals, databases, data services, service components and; Business Processes, The third gap is that it does not recommend the right set of tools with which enterprise grade SOA Security, based on the the two principles mentioned above can be implemented. With these gaps in place, demonstrating and maintaining compliance with regulations and laws will be difficult. In this blog, I will describe the concept of Independent Chain of Command in detail, I will describe the other gaps in the next two entries.

Who Needs the SOA Competency Center in this world?

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:06:45 +0000

I can almost call it a trend as I see it happening again and again, case after the case. As soon as enterprises get active on SOA, apart from SOA technology platform and business service pilot concerns enterprises get their ideas bubbling around ‘SOA competency center’. It is an invariable expectation of having some sort of competency center that will give the enterprises whatever they want from SOA. Let me spend few paragraphs here to bring certain perspective to those who might be seriously attached to the competency center for SOA and might be seeking some direction.

Selecting SOA Management Tool

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:34:49 +0000

Posted by Animesh Ghosh, Technical Architect

SOA is a set of Policies, Practices and Architectural patterns; it is not Technology, Product or Standard. These set of Policies, Practices and Architectural patterns must be a part of Governance which is a decision and accountability framework. Governance does not prescribe how to manage an organization on a daily basis. However, it provides a collection of solutions and policies coupled with a method that encourages desirable strategic behavior.

It has never been too early or too late for an organization to start SOA Governance, as soon an organization starts its SOA journey, it must be accompanied by a proper Governance mechanism. This journey could be well supported if there is a proper SOA Management and Monitoring infrastructure in place.

What Difference can SOA make?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:59:23 +0000

Gartner predicts that by 2009, a service-oriented eco-system will mature and provide the foundation for a massive wave of business process innovation. Most organizations today have some level if interest in SOA as a 'future' strategy. However, an early barrier to the adoption of SOA is the appreciation of the difference that SOA can make to the organization. Maturity of SOA adoption across the globe has not yet reached the level that can provide measurable benchmark for predictable ROI commitment. Hence, the qualitative appreciation of the SOA values can probably play a critical role in the accelerating the momentum of the SOA initiatives. Range of opportunities that SOA brings to table allow organizations to exploit multi-dimensional benefits from SOA. SOA can make lot of difference to the organization if it is adopted as a mainstream Business-IT framework.

Turbocharge your SOA Infrastructure with XML Appliances- Part III ( Some numbers from Intel )

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:39:21 +0000

In the last 2 blog posts, I talked about use of XML Appliances to turbocharge your SOA infrastructure. In this blog, I intend to provide some numbers provided by Intel. Most other vendors do not seem to have these numbers in a public document. The features described here are available from many different vendors, and the other products in the space are equally good, with comparable performance numbers.

Future possibilities explored at IEEE SCC 2008

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:40:44 +0000

Well as with any other conference, the excitement slowly goes down as number of days pass by. There were fewer participants for Day 3 and Day 4, with hardly authors seen around for presenting their work. Keynotes in my view should throw some light on to new research directions, trends and innovation opportunities. Keynote themes at SCC 2008 on three days also were pointing a direction.

Day 2, more break out sessions at IEEE SCC 2008

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:10:13 +0000

It was the day of presenting research and industry papers. There were many interesting topics that caught my attention; but I had the choice of attending only a few as they were mostly running in parallel breakout sessions. I certainly did not want to miss the sessions that were discussing - management of distributed collaborative centers for executing work requests, change request scheduling, using domain knowledge for service integration, establishing service model from business model and variation oriented engineering...

Day 1 at IEEE SCC 2008 Conference...

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:47:02 +0000

I had to travel around the world to attend a conference. Well it was at Hawaii, so travel really didn't matter much. It was Day 1 of IEEE SCC 2008 conference, this day was dedicated to some interesting workshops like Electronic service marketing, Web X.0, WS composition and adaptation, Scientific workflows. I had to present three papers at Service and Process Oriented Engineering Workshop (SOPOSE) (you can find the program here).

SOA Reference Model & Reference Architecture – The Link

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:42:22 +0000

As IT is always full of jargons, SOA is no exception. One of the most commonly used terminology in SOA world is the term ‘Reference Architecture’. However, there are several places where people seem to mix-up the term ‘Reference Architecture’ with ‘Reference Model’ which puzzled me initially to a large extent. Since then I have been trying to understand the fundamental difference between these two and trying to address the following questions that kept coming up in my mind –
-          Are they same?
-          What is the relationship between the two
-          Do they co-exist
-          How does one define them and what are the different characteristics

Setting high impact KPIs to get real value of BPM investments

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:33:56 +0000

One of the key benefits of BPM solution is that it provides insights into the performance of business processes through Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and enables process analysts to identify impediments & bottlenecks in performance of the business processes. While that sounds very exciting, getting pointers to the real bottlenecks is not easy. ......

TurboCharge your SOA Infrastructure with XML Appliances-Part II

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:10:11 +0000

In this and subsequent blogs, I plan to discuss the advanced features of XML Appliances: Field Level Fine Grained Security, Rule Based XML validation, XML to HTML transformation, XML to WML transformation and XML to XML transformation. In this and subsequent blog entries, I will discuss only Fine Grain entitlements, and discuss other aspects in a subsequent blog entry.

Service Oriented Elephant?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:52:58 +0000

SOA applicability is very dependent on an organization's environment. Recently I got into a discussion about "SOA in the small." Is it feasible? I think not. But IMHO elements of SOA can be applied to the organization to fit into an enterprise SOA roadmap

The new movie on the Eisenhower System of Enterprise IT i.e. ESB?

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:26:47 +0000

The Eisenhower System was envisioned as a systematic, incrementally adoptable plan for surface transport for the United States, which has been in build and operation for around 50 years. It acts as the fundamental artery of passenger and goods transport across United States.

When we study the history and operation of the Eisenhower System (a.k.a The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways | http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/routefinder/), we will find many parallels to the information superhighway of the Enterprise, the Service Bus, such as

The Right Orientation: Object, Service or Resource

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:15:42 +0000

We are continuously striving to represent the software concepts in such a way so that we can easily relate them to the real world entities and activities. IT provided automation and tools to create and facilitate a better business environment. Along this journey somewhere the solution (IT) to solve the business problems itself became a problem due to the complexities it created, which paved the way for creating new approaches to solve the business problems. The journey showed us the various styles of software representations and highlighted the differences in thought process in creating the software.