SOA infrastructure

VMware scoops up SpringSource for more than $362 million

The overnight news is that web application framework specialist SpringSource was scooped up by virtualization giant VMware for about $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of some $58 million of unvested stock and options. It seems the industry thrust toward cloud computing is creating stranger and stranger sets of bedfellows… Continued »

SOA service managers wanted

Ovum analyst Tony Baer reaffirms the link between SOA and IT Service Management in a blog post - entitled ”What’s a Service? Who’s Responsible?”

He talks briefly about the role ITIL can play, and in more detail about an emerging notion that a ”Service Manager” role may have a place in the modern orgainization. He considers the notion of who today is responsible for ensuring services meet business needs and that infrastrucutre is adquate to support those services.

Baer asks if what is needed is ”a sort of uber role that ensures that the service
(1) responds to a bona fide business need
(2) is consistent with enterprise architectural standards and does not needlessly duplicate what is already in place, and
(3) won’t break IT infrastructure or physical delivery.

This is a thoughtful piece. Clearly, the sobriquet ”Service Manager” may need some tuning, as the title seems equally apt for an individual charged with scheduling oil changes or refrigerator repairs.

Related ITILness
”What’s a Service? Who’s Responsible?” - OnStrategies blog

Survey sees SOA strength

The recent tremendous upheaval in the world economy did not bring out the best in the large army of SOA pundits. The upheaval was going to be “the end of SOA” or SOA was going to be “the answer” to the upheaval. The comments did not run the spectrum – the comments ended up on one end of the teeter-totter or other.  Some SOA pundits have been on auto-pilot so long, the auto-pilot is now the pilot. Where is SOA, really? We felt asking the audiences at TechTarget Application Development Group member sites SearchSOA.com and TheServerSide.com would shed a brighter light on the somewhat murky topic. Continued »

Test SOA for the unexpected

Testing service-oriented architecture requires thinking outside the box to the point that your test cases hit an application with totally unexpected input, argues Thomas Fredell, CTO of IntraLinks. Continued »

HP builds ‘culture of governance’ for SOA

HP solidifies leadership in SOA governance with Systinet 3.0, which now covers services lifecycle, business process, and IT service management, writes analyst Dana Gardner in his blog this week.

“The newest market leading Systinet UDDI registry forms the cockpit for managing not only services, but with the newly added Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) support, takes the helm for business processes, too,” Gardner writes. “HP plans to further push the envelope on a master management value even further into IT operations and IT Service Management, as well as a PPM role with the registry.”

The addition of a configuration management database (CMDB) sets the stage for a wider “culture of governance” to emerge in enterprises, Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager at HP Software, tells Gardner. 

Gardner also points to a comprehensive assessment of HP’s governance products and strategies by fellow analyst Brad Shimmin posted on the Current Analysis Website.

In SOA provides a test for QA, HP finds, SearchSOA covered HPs expansion of governance to cover quality assurance. And in an earlier article, HP integrates design and runtime SOA governance, SearchSOA covered the design time / runtime integration in Systinet.

It’s official: IONA is part of Progress

Lost in all the bustle of a news-rich early September was the word that Progress Software closed the deal to acquire IONA Technologies plc.

Some details..

Progress acquired IONA for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $162 million and approximately $107 million net of cash and marketable securities reported on June 30, 2008, which it funded with existing cash resources.

IONA was always among the more interesting companies in the software firmament. It originally came out of computer science academic efforts in Ireland, and was one of the earliest companies to focus on distributed computing. It was one of a handful of upstarts looking to ride the CORBA ORB standard to market. Its star was Orbix.

One of its big early successes was one of technology’ biggest all-time failures. But IONA leveraged what it learned as part of Motorola Iridium Satellite communication effort. [Wikipedia tells us that the satellites and other assets and technology behind Iridium were thought to have cost on the order of $6 billion – but that the bankrupt firm later sold for a mere $25 million.]

Getting to market with an ORB was just step-one for IONA. The company rolled with the Web services and SOA trends; it managed to stay in the game after other independent ORB makers were forgotten, adjusting as market demand changed. It is possible to project that IONA will become an enduring franchise as it comes under the Progress umbrella. Before it is too late, can anyone tell us what ‘IONA’ means?

When SOA met WOA, or Building applications that work while buzz pesters you

SOA has had a bit of a rough summer. The Best and Brightest of the SOA bloggers have publicly ruminated long and lamentably on SOA’s future. There has been a bit of SOA fatigue in evidence. Could it be because many SOA projects are ready to roll out and some people want to be elsewhere when one or two implode?

SOA fatigue may be traced to aspects of SOA that people have sometimes rightly described as bloated. For SOA repositories and SOA governance the jury is still out. Continued »

Sun targets BEA WebLogic users

Former BEA customers, who may be unhappy with Oracle Corp.’s plans for WebLogic as its main service-oriented architecture (SOA) server, are targeted by Sun Microsystems Inc., which today announced a migration program for its JavaCAPS SOA platform. Sun is touting the lower price and open source status of JavaCAPS for former BEA customers looking for an alternative to the Oracle version of WebLogic, said Ashesh Badani, SOA director at Sun.

Continued »

So how SOA are ESBs?

Last week we at SearchSOA.com ran a story about how ESBs aren’t as interoperable as users might expect them to be. The story prompted a response from StrikeIron CEO Dave Linthicum, basically wondering if the bigger problem here is bad architecture. He wrote:

Call me crazy, but would it not make more sense to have a centralized plan as to what the SOA should be, based on the requirements of the business, versus people dashing out and shelling out the dollars for an ESB for some one-off tactical reason, or more likely just acting out of reaction to the hype? Now, you’re left with a dysfunctional mess that’s not easily corrected, and clearly costly.

Joe McKendrick over at ZDNet picked up on that and put together a brief history of ESB criticism. Linthicum’s blog entry also drew a lot fire down in its comments section (be sure to check them out as iTKO’s John Michelsen, the interviewee in our original article, makes a few points on the unavoidable nature of multiple ESBs). The response in fact spurred Linthicum to write a follow up entry addressing some of the critics of his first entry. After pointing out many of the dysfunctional things he’s heard over the years, he wrote:

[W]hat I’m asserting is that there has to be some architecture forethought behind dragging any technology into the enterprise, and I suspect that’s not occurring.

To be fair, he doesn’t suspect it. He knows that’s the case. We all know that’s the case. As Software AG’s Miko Matsumura put it in another article we ran last week, “People are addicted to messed up IT.”

Anyway, Linthicum finished his latest post with a request:

So, in the spirit of having an open mind, send me your reasons for leveraging multiple ESBs, and why that’s a good approach for your enterprise architecture. Also, while you’re at it, make sure to send me the reasons you’re using an ESB to begin with: your requirements and the reasoning behind the solution. I won’t post them unless you say it’s okay.

It’s an interesting topic, so make sure to send Dave your reasons, if you’ve got some. For my part, I know a lot of people who despise ESBs. During one interview I did with an analyst back in 2005, he referred to ESBs at “methadone.” This was actually praise for the ESB, making the case that it was better than EAI. Yet I know others who just as adamantly argue that at some point you’ve got to implement a service or pull together applications after a corporate merger, and at that point you will find yourself wanting an ESB.

Earlier this year, I actually did a podcast with Mulesource CEO Dave Rosenberg about why he maintains that enterprises will need to accommodate multiple ESBs inside their SOAs.

I would argue the larger point here, and this is where Michelsen was focused in the original article, is that multiple ESBs are a fact of life. No matter if it may be sub-optimal in terms of architecture, a good architecture should be able to tackle this kind of problem, or at least good governance should help ameliorate it. Mergers and acquisitions will happen. You will need to combine services with outside entities. Different divisions will buy disparate products, even if they shouldn’t. This doesn’t even touch on technology creep from the open source arena.

So it’s really two questions. The first is do you even need one ESB let alone many? It’s a fair question and one that every end user ought to put serious thought into answering. The second is, how do you deal with multiple ESBs in your infrastructure? Because no matter how you answer the first question, you will need to manage this situation for at least the near term.

SOA acquisition week: Progress adds Mindreef

You wouldn’t know the mergers and acquisitions market on Wall Street was in the doldrums if you were just watching Progress Software Corp. this week.

First, Progress snapped up IonaTechnologies Inc., adding Iona’s Artix ESB technology and CORBA legacy customer base. Then on Friday Progress announced that it has also purchased Mindreef Inc., the privately-held vendor of testing and service validation tools for service-oriented architecture (SOA), for an undisclosed price.

The Progress acquisition of Mindreef almost got lost in the hoopla surrounding the purchase of Iona, wrote analyst Joe McKendrick on his ZDNet blog on Thursday. He pointed out the importance of Mindreef’s philosophy of reaching out with its tools to practically everyone involved in SOA development.

“Mindreef’s emphasis has been on enabling professionals from all sides of SOA - architects, developers, and managers - to better collaborate on service design and implementation,” McKendrick wrote.

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC., who earlier in the week said the Iona deal made good sense for Progress, also saw value in the Mindreef acquisition.

“Both the Mindreef and IONA deals are great moves for Progress,” Bloomberg said. “Governance, quality, and management are more important to SOA success than middleware is, so it’s a great sign that they’re adding SOA quality to the mix.”

Change management is a crucial piece of SOA that appears to be missing in many vendor offerings, the ZapThink analyst noted. 

“After all, unless you enable broad-based service consumption and composition in environments of continual change, which is what SOA is all about, you can’t have effective SOA. It’s surprising that more SOA infrastructure companies haven’t made a deeper investment in SOA governance, quality, and management solutions, since they will rapidly realize that the success of their SOA initiatives depend on successfully addressing those issues.”

 This week’s acquisitions of Iona and Mindreef were a win-win for Progress in Bloomberg’s view.

“Progress is doing a great job of rounding out its SOA offerings by adding Mindreef’s SOA quality solutions to the mix,” the ZapThink analyst said.

In a statement released on Friday regarding the Mindreef acquisition, Progress said it was adding three Mindreef tools to its Actional SOA Management product line:

• SOAPscope Server
• SOAPscope Architect
• SOAPscope Developer

Progress and Mindreef are planning a Webinar in mid-July to further explain how the products will fit together, according to McKendrick.