SOA

Overheard - Origins of Amazon Mechanical Turk

“Mechanical Turk began life as a service that Amazon itself needed…Amazon had millions of Web pages that described individual products, but it wanted to weed out the duplicate pages.” Jason Pontin, Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

Amazon makes money from Mechanical Turk by charging companies 10 percent of the price of a successfully completed HIT. For simple HITs that cost less than 1 cent, Amazon charges half a cent. ChaCha intends to make money the way most other search companies do: by charging advertisers for contextually relevant links and advertisements.

If you haven’t heard about ChaCha yet, it’s a free voice search service for mobile phones. It’s interesting that one of ChaCha’s investors is Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.  According to marketing literature:

ChaCha, a free mobile answers service, allows users to call 1-800-2ChaCha™ or text questions to ChaCha (242242™) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. Its unique advertising solutions provide pay-for-performance opportunities for advertisers to precisely target and embed their messages within millions of text conversations.

Aha! So maybe Mechanical Turk isn’t so much about enterprise search — it’s really about mobile voice search!  Makes sense. Amazon would have a revenue stream by serving highly targeted ads along with the search results.

Overheard: Explaining IT to the business side - marketecture

It seems that every presentation has that one attractively drawn diagram that purports to illustrate how the vendor’s product fits into their customers’ IT environments. Such diagrams, however, rarely have any technical detail since they are not intended for consumption by developers or architects. Rather, they are typically created by marketing people to communicate to analysts, prospective customers, investors and the press. Yes, I’m talking about marketecture. Jason Bloomberg, What is the shape of a service-oriented architecture?

Ok. So marketecture is the basically a buzzword for explaining things to the business side.  Jason does a good job analyzing the use of diagrams in SOA marchitecture. All of them look sufficiently confusing to me.

 Now, marketecture (”marketing” plus “architecture,” in case you haven’t figured that out yet) serves an important purpose. We’re talking about fairly complex concepts such as distributed computing architectures, and no matter how you cut it, such architectures have a lot of different pieces that talk to each other in numerous different ways. Every vendor must come up with effective approaches for simplifying their message so that people other than hardcore techies can understand it.

Overheard: A good SOA architect is like an expensive wedding planner

Like a high-dollar wedding planner, an SOA architect can spare you mistakes and embarrassments while making the big event relatively painless, mostly by eliminating any unforeseen and unwanted surprises. Pam Baker, Best Reuse Plays in SOA

I laughed out loud when I read this analogy, picturing the CEO as Bridezilla and the rest of the executive board as the wedding party. Coincidently, Jason Bloomberg, over at SearchSOA.com, was just explaining that there’s a shortage of good SOA consultants right now.

Overheard: SOA - how do you measure success?

Combining both the Service-oriented Vitality Index and the SoROI provides a much clearer picture of a company’s SOA health. The Service-oriented Vitality Index, or SoVI, is the ratio of revenue generated from a service (or services) over the last 12 months as compared with all other existing SOA revenue… The SoROI is the cumulative before tax profits over “N” number of years from SOA-driven products divided by the cumulative product expenditures for that same period. Jerry Smith, 10 Measures for Successful SOA Implementations

Jerry Smith does a nice job breaking down some of the issues involved in making a business case for SOA. How do you measure success? And how do you get everyone to agree on the metrics? Jerry suggests there are ten ways you can measure success. All of them make sense to me except for SoVI. I need to go read more about SoVI and SoROI. Are they legitimate metrics or are they just biz-tech voodoo?

Overheard: Microsoft gets a “D” in SOA

Just what the world needs…yet another programming language. As soon as you say it’s aimed at non-developers, “real” developers will avoid it like the plague. And without “real” developer support, it’s dead in the water. Fred Fredrickson, responding to Mary Jo Foley’s blog post Microsoft declares its modeling love with a new language, ‘D’

Overheard: Say goodbye to middleware as a standalone offering

The notion of middleware as a standalone offering is disappearing. Aneel Bhusri as quoted in SaaS Start-Up Workday Acquires Cape Clear

Workday acquired Cape Clear Software, one of the last remaining independent providers of an enterprise service bus, the middleware technology for service-oriented architecture. The SaaS startup, also known as the PeopleSoft alumni association, has positioned itself as an on-demand alternative to ERP.

Mary Hayes Weier writes “It’s a critical technology and talent acquisition for Workday, since IT managers often cite concerns about integrating their legacy apps with on-demand apps as the biggest barrier to SaaS adoption.”

Overheard: Greg the Architect

Overheard: Application developers are voting SOA with their feet

“This morning I received a message from TechTarget telling me that SearchWebServices.com is renaming itself to SearchSOA.com. According to TechTarget the move is in line with a shift of attitudes and efforts within the application development community. As I’ve written many times, SOA is not Web Services. This move is a signal that application developers are voting with their feet. I wish TechTarget well.” Frank Cohen, SOA and Web Services In The Development Community

Overheard: SOA explained

“This article presents a simple, technology-agnostic approach to designing and evolving SOAs. You will not see acronyms such as WSDL, SOAP, or REST, and I promise not to use technical terms like “orchestration,” “realization,” and “governance.”’ Dan North, A Low-Tech Approach to Understanding SOA

SOA stand for “service oriented architecture.” It sounds scary, but it’s not. It’s really just one computer program talking to another — and each of the programs is called a service. Dan North does a great job explaining it.

Overheard: SOA, 2B or not 2B an acronym?

“Typically, it’s either a word or it’s not. No two ways about it. You don’t hear anyone talking about deploying on the U-N-I-X operating system, and no one attaches S-O-A-P headers on their Web services. GUI, of course, is Gooey. G-U-I sounds like something you could get locked up for.” Joe McKendrick, Should “SOA” be a Word, or Stay an Acronym?