Paul discussesOracle’s comprehensive strategy and roadmap for it’s [tag]Fusion Middleware[/tag] [tag]SOA[/tag] stack. After BEA’s merger with [tag]Oracle[/tag] for $8.5 Billion,  it was predicted but one of the most awaited disclosures in the [tag]SOA[/tag] 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. (more…)

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 [tag]Progress[/tag]?

[tag]M&A[/tag]s is not new to [tag]Progress[/tag]. 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 [tag]SOA[/tag] offering giving a heads on to honchos like IBM and Oracle when it comes to SOA product stack.

What this means for [tag]Mindreef[/tag] and [tag]IONA[/tag]?

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.

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…

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.