SOA is an architectural style that corporate use to build and provision business services in an platform agnostic fashion. Using Service Oriented Architecture, diverse IT applications (Legacy, COTS and custom built) can be integrated using standards based platform. SOA results in loose coupling of endpoints, localizing the changes, as the IT infrastructure matures to cope up with changing business needs of an organization. This results in faster rollout cycles of IT development, adding to the agility requirements of aggressive market scenarios. A successful SOA adoption into an organization spans beyond putting technical architecture and right SOA products in place. It requires integration of SOA best practices into programme (SOA) governance and IT operational processes. From my experience in large SOA rollouts, an organization’s SOA governance strategy should include all aspects of People, Processes and Architecture to be able to truly benefit and enable reuse.

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Paul discussesOracle’s comprehensive strategy and roadmap for it’s Fusion Middleware SOA stack. After BEA’s merger with Oracle for $8.5 Billion,  it was predicted but one of the most awaited disclosures in the SOA world. Here is my take on Charles Phillips’ disclosure in his 105 minute webcast:

1. There will be no forced migration for existing BEA customers.

I assume, Oracle will make it more tempting for you to move into Oracle suite rather than forcing you out of BEA. As a customer, I would never like to stay with the same version for entire lifetime. There are lots of good things happening in this world and to remain competitive, I feel its very important to be continuously upgrade to newer technologies. Oracle has beautiful plans to bring in Fusion applications. This should make things a lot easier for existing BEA customers to scale up to a pure SOA environments. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Fusion Middleware, SOA, Oracle, SOA

This is a pleasant news. In my post on June, 16, 2008, I predicted that a consolidation in SOA Quality and Operations space is inevitable as the biggies would run to fill in these holes in their stack.

What this means for Progress?

M&As is not new to Progress. They had acquired Actional sometime back to incorporate SOA management and policy enforcement capabilities to the Progress SOA suite. Progress will benefit tremendously by augmenting multi web Standards based integration capabilities of IONA to Sonic ESB and Sonic MQ. Mindreef will augment the hole in the SOA quality and validation area. Progress is all set to have an end to end SOA offering giving a heads on to honchos like IBM and Oracle when it comes to SOA product stack.

What this means for Mindreef and IONA?

SOA is increasingly becoming a tough market for niche players like Mindreef and IONA. Customers are looking at lowering the TCO by going with a single SOA vendor strategy. I foresee a increase in value proposition by integrating these tools with a wider SOA stack and then enabling a sell through.

What this means for customers?

Well, if you were one of the SOA starters, who was wondering which vendor to look for implementing enterprise SOA, you got to add one more tool into your checklist. Progress will now have a compelling value proposition and could easily be the tool of your choice.

Today, Progress already has a rich toolset on SOA stack. These acquisitions will further endorse Progress as a force to reckon with in SOA market.

Technorati Tags: Progress, M&A, Progress, SOA, Mindreef, IONA

What is Social Omnipresence?

Social Omnipresence is term coined for a platform or service neutral roaming network in Social networking world.

Just imagine you take your social network anywhere you go, beyond the boundaries of your PC, Laptop, Mobile and even your network host. So now, you are at the center of your network, that comprises of friends in Orkut or Facebook, Professional connections in Linked In, your Twitter followers and your blog readers etc.. You choose the platform that you want to use according to your convinience and your network make the decisions based on their preferences. Irrespective of platform that you choose to host your identity on, your network follows you…

Are we Ready Yet?

The building blocks are all there already. You have social networking sites. You have Mobile Social networks that are catching up in a big way. You have emerging standards like Open Social and Google Friend Connect that will glue your identity together. Social Network Portability takes care of making your profile information available on all affiliated sites. OAuth and OpenID become your Social Security Identification (like SSN in real world). Just imagine, this opens a whole new business model for network aggregators. We will see equivalents of Technorati and Digg to swarm the world of social networking. A recent report from Computer world confirms that the social networking community will hit 975 million mark by 2012. This opens up a huge market for “Social Networker” centric busines models.

It’s Feasibility

How feasible is this concept in today’s scenario? Especially with the recent stand off between Google and Facebook. I dont this as a great threat. Infact, any new promising technology or concept always has multiple fathers claiming its origin. Many standards mushroom around it and its finally the user community and market forces, which decide the winner. Even if there are multiple standards that emerge around this concept, It would be rather easy to integrate using 3-4 parallel standards than 100s non standard compliant network. If you have worries about internet penetration, mobile usage and other demographics, be rest assured all trends are on their way up.

Conclusion

As I write this post, there are so many permutations and combinations that I can think of. Blog best practices that I made for my blog restrict me to make it any longer. I will leave that for later day and will leave you with this thought. And if you still think this concept is far away. Look at this post from Mashable.

Technorati Tags: social network, Mobile Social networks, Open Social, Google Friend Connect, network aggregators, Technorati, Digg, Facebook, Mashable

I fully agree with George Colony on his thought provoking post. Just add me to the list of people who have been clicking and typing on the Microsoft platform for 15 years now.

Bill Gates was probably the best thing that  happened to Microsoft. But as all good things come to end, its time, Microsoft moves ahead.

Heres my analysis of what’s wrong with Microsoft:

1. Microsoft has become too predictable. The best thing about Bill Gates was that he was repetitive and yet innovative. I quote an example of Windows 95. It wasn’t something radically different. But the way it drove platform convergence on a users desktop…made it phenominal. And that was the reason for its success.
2. Always chasing Google. My appologies for being so blunt. Competing is not the same as following. When google came up with GMail. It was just an Email service yet it as so different. As a avid user, when I expect something from Microsoft, I expect an enjoying user experience. That how it has been at Microsoft.
3. Not leveraging it’s community.  Microsoft has by far the largest community of users. I believe most of the Google and Yahoo lovers themselves use Microsoft platform. Leverage that community. Integrate Desktop with online experience. Revive the magic of simplicity and ease that Windows 95 promised.
4. Missing the fizz of Innovation. Microsoft products and services are increasingly becoming stereotyped. Microsoft needs a killer App.

After, the yahoo debacle, I am sure Steve Balmer is taking his time out and spending his thoughts on what could best direction for Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: Bill Gates, Microsoft

SOA product stacks have seen a lot of turbulence in past few years. The recent one that created ripples in the industry was Oracle’s BEA acquisition. That leaves us with a good question. It is over yet? Or we will witness some more action…

If one looks at the SOA stacks from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and others, they pretty much have an offering to cover various aspects like Service enablement, ESB, BPM, BAM and Governance etc. Where I still see a void is with the tactical aspects of the game. The companies that are adopting SOA, are increasingly understanding the importance of Quality management of SOA assets and looking at ways to align the operations team to manage SOA infrastructure. The traditional testing methodologies and ITSM processes need an upgrade to support the company’s SOA vision. It is this void that will drive next level of consolidation. Vendors would want to enhance their existing offerings in this space by either enhancing their products or buying once that are already into this space. Not so recent acquisition of Mercury by HP has seen some action. HP has already come up with dedicated offering around SOA testing and Operations by bringing out that SOA flavor in their Quality Center and Business Availability Center. There are several niche players like Amberpoint, webLayers, ITKO Lisa and Parasoft that target Quality management aspects. These niche players could be easy targets of biggies like Oracles and IBMs of the world who want to boast of themselves as a single stop shop of all the SOA needs…

Blogosphere is swarmed with posts on the recent Yahoo-Microsoft fiasco and Google coming as a saviour of Yahoo. In one such post on Tech Crunch Mike refers this as a mass destruction of investor’s trust and on the contrary Fred Wilson defends the move and terms this as Yahoo’s opportunity to get lean and focus more on what it is good at. I kind of extrapolate these thoughts and look at another aspect of the show. Is this the end of this fiasco..May be not. I see this as the beginning of another crusade, this time it’s on Internet Market share. One one side it’s the undisputed leader of Desktop PCs- Microsoft and on the other side its the king of cyberspace - Google. And when there are two kings they always wrestle to be on top of each other. Its not a matter of being the number one. Its about being the king of the world…

Let’s get a little deeper into the whole thing and see how important it is for each of them to fight for the throne. Application space is swarmed by many big and small players. Google’s best bet is the internet. They want to leverage the reach of internet to build a platform where if you need something on the web…choice is simple, it’s Google. There is hardly anything that Google has left. Right from Messenger to email, entertainment to social networking, desktop search to mobile platform. There is a Google offering everywhere. The idea is simple, after having a good share of the bytes you send on the internet, it wants to have a share of your Hard disk space too. It has launched offline Google Apps, Reader and now they are planning even an Operating system for mobiles.

Microsoft come from the other side of the world. Its leadership in desktop is already indisputable. Its fighting every inch of your corporate bytes by rubbing shoulders with Oracles and IBMs of the world. So why leave Internet for someone else. They have equally competing products…They call it Windows Live. So it has a maps, it has a Mail, messenger a social community as well. Its already into your mobiles. The intent of Microsoft is simple. Every click you make. Either on the desktop or on your mobile or in the Browser. Every piece of space that you interact should run on Microsoft software.

I see this moving beyond Yahoo acquisition. I see a tussle that has just come out in open and will be here to stay for sometime. What this really means a fresh era of consolidation. Not only in the leading internet platforms like Google and Microsoft but also in other prominent web companies; as they struggle to regain the market share.

Your thoughts welcome….

Social networking is not new. It has been there for quite sometime now. It’s the cybercrowd that drives such applications. Isn’t it? And the statistics on Orkut, Facebook, mySpace and other famous platforms provide enough evidence that it is limited to young Tech Savvy generation. Mobile will drive the Next-Gen Social networking, Social network 3.0 as they say it. Last September Google bought Zingku, to extend it famous Social network to mobile phones. I was just analysing the trends and using my common man sense (as a mobile user myself) to see what factors would really break the “barriers to entry” for mobile social networking concept and make such apps better accepted by mobile audience. Here are my thoughts…

1. Usability of such apps will be the key- Though mobiles are becoming increasingly popular, they are still used by masses for just making calls. Though the mobiles are becoming intelligent, with new features and processing power, still the user interface remains limited. How many people actually use BlackBerry like PDAs with QWERTY keyboard. The screensize have increased but still it is small enough for users to match the visual experience of laptop or a PC. The mobile social networking platforms have to make the User Interface easy. That is the key. It is a great challenge for all your usability designers and graphics visualizers to make it as simple as possible. Remember, most of the mobile users still sont have a QWERTY keyboard.
2. Disconnected network- After voice, SMS/text is still the single largest way people communicate. The costs are high depending on you mobile plan and country. Especially, when you ask user to text to an international number. GPRS and 3G would be the alternatives, but have lower penetration in parts of the world. The idea here is to allow a disconnected way to connect with your social network. Users should be able to post there messages and store it locally. Once they are near a bluetooth zone, WIFI zone or in a sync mode with your PC, these get syncronised.
3. Low cost Phones - Low cost phones are a real bottleneck. New Gen phones are priced higher. The idea here is to introduce innovative ways to facilitate low cost handset users to network. Once the masses are hooked on to it, this could be a very good incentive for masses to move to more featured phones.

The discussions and ideas could be endless and I encourag that. The key point that I am trying to make is the mobile platform is a different world. The problems are different. Only those applications that bring good things in a simple and easier way to mobile users will see the boom….

According to the worldwide survey of 1500 CIO’s by Gartner Executive Programmes, Retaining, Targeting and Attracting new customers will remain a top priority for all CIOs in 2008. The CIOs will need to work with the business teams to align their IT systems to meet this goal. In their recent article, Gartner came up with 7 Initiatives to Improve Customer experience. This is an interesting food for thought for all SOA strategists. Technologists have been boasting about Service Oriented Architecture for a long time on how SOA can help make IT systems more scalable to changing business needs. I see this as a tremendous potential for the SOA visionaries to prove their points. It’s time, we revisit these 7 initiatives and see what advantage an organisation would get if they are already onboard SOA journey.

1. Act on feedback, deploy changes and communicate actions to
   employees and customers
2. Design processes from the outside in
3. Act as one organisation to ensure consistency
4. Be open
5. Personalise products and experiences
6. Alter attitudes and employee behaviour
7. Design the complete customer experience

The trick here is, once your feedback machinery is up and working, how quickely you incorporate customer feedbacks and respond to their needs. The potential bottleneck areas would be typically Business processes, Products/Services, Faster response to customer issues and reach the right customers for right products. Typically, changes in all these areas will not leave the IT systems untouched. The companies who have been hooked on to SOA for sometime now, would be able to discretely make changes in the services to bundle new products. They would be better armed to localize business process changes and come to production much faster. Using SOA, it will be easier for organisations to integrate diverse applications to generate a 360 view of customer for better customer behaviour intelligence and customer service. Canonicals will do the trick for information aggregation and will play a vital role in making customer data available as one entity. SOA principles have always been advocating that a business is run by business processes. So, let all the actors interact and be governed by business processes. The organisations, that have enterprise architecture on SOA principles, will see the fastest returns on the improvements as their multiple channels respond uniformly to the changes/improvements in the business processes. The organisations no longer act as silos and will repond to customer, irrespective of multiple channels, as one entity now. The theory of “doing the way, it should be” will take care of their pain points.

The neverending tussle between the technologists and the business team continues. And this time it’s around a new buzzword - SOA. While the technologists argue that SOA will bring down the OPEX/CAPEX and make business more agile; The business guys worry whether this is just another blah-blah, that will burn some more $$$ out of their IT budgets.
Here is how Business folks think…
My competition is launching a new product X in Christmas time. I need to have a differentiator to compete. No problem. I already have 3 products A, B and C. So if I pick up 3 features of product A, 2 from B and another three from C and bundle it together, I have a competing product which will better product X. Now here is the trick…I will launch it just before Christmas so that I can get all the attention in the market.
Here is how IT folks think…
I wish it was this simple. Product A, B and C are supported by different applications. When we designed these applications we never thought we would see this case. If we start building this I don’t think we will be ready before Christmas. I wish I had a way I could bundle and unbundle stuff quickly.
With due regards to the efforts put up by your IT team, SOA exactly lets you do this. SOA helps you build a “wear and tear” friendly architecture, that can respond to these needs of your business.
So here is the idea…
SOA tells you to build services out of applications. These services are designed to be platform agnostic and thus help you disconnect from details like OS, programming platform etc. So you don’t have to worry about whether your customer data is in out which CRM product. All you need to know is there is a service called getCustomerData that can help you query customer information. This is the input and output of the service. You can also bundle the services to represent a business functionality. In SOA world, we call it a business service. For example, A billing service could call getCustomerID and then get prepaid phone bill along with Internet usage from different services exposed out of separate billing applications. What you get is a consolidated bill for the customer “Bill Clinton”.
Good, now that you don’t have to worry about systems, you could focus more on building business processes that connect with these services, when they need to. Automate these processes to streamline your business. The hand off points are automated. People in your organization need to more worry about their workitems rather than who gives what information and where it goes to. Moreover, no redundant data entries.
Once you have automated your processes, how do you know what is happening to your business ? SOA advocates you to build a monitoring layer on top of processes that lets to have dashboards showing real time data on your KPIs (Key performance indicators).
Putting it all together…
So now, when you want to bundle new products. All you need to do is reuse and reconnect the existing services, build ones that you may not have today. Modify specific business process to accommodate the new product and you are done…ready to launch. Isn’t it making your IT work the way your business wants. This may sound far more simple than it is in actual. There are complexities involved and I would love to translate that to simple english too. However, for now I will save that for another post.