Be prepared to add another “as a” to the list of Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and so on. Kapow describes its latest edition as the first software platform of its kind to feature “Integration-as-a-Self-Service” through the introduction of lightweight end-user apps. These apps are dubbed ”Kapplets.”

Kapow was early to field a software type that was often described as the “enterprise mashup.” Using XML, it created a Web data extraction tool for getting catalog and other data from the Web, and performing useful transformations on that data. Kapow continues to add to its product base.

Customers such as car maker Audi are able to use the software to generate real-time feeds to an in-car multimedia system without creating dependencies on individual information providers’ custom APIs, according to Rick Kawamura, vice president, marketing, Kapow.

Big consultancies have a tendency to code to APIs, but this doesn’t scale in an era of ‘get it done quick,’ said Kawamura, who sees mobile, social, cloud and big data changing the workplace dynamic. However, IT still does have an important role, at least for now.

Kapow Kapplets are said to put big data more directly into the hands of business users, but the business leaders are required to describe what they need to their IT department, which then uses Kapow Katalyst 9.0 to integrate data and applications. IT then makes Kapplets – displayed as clickable icons – available to workers as part of automated workflow. This lets employees, customers and partners control and run “the automation and integration of disparate systems and data sources.”

Clearly we are in the era of the programmable Web. It may take many forms. Will it be so easily programmable that any interested business person someday could develop against it? What do you think?  – Jack Vaughan

These machines are said to cope with complexity, one of the biggest hurdles to software integration today, by ”canning” known good integration configurations. As with a prefabricated house, there is room for customization, but the appliance may not meet the special needs of all integration developers.

Ease of integration is the basic raison d’etat  behind IBM’s PureSystems box, shown above. Integration has become such a tangle, that there is little doubt some shops will consider the box as a way to cope.  The path has been set for Big Blue shops by DataPower, the XML appliance that IBM acquired a number of years ago from start-up DataPower and took to market in a big way. For many IBM-oriented undertakings, ”DataPower” is almost synonymous with ”ESB.” Its utility was especially enhanced with the addition of object brokering and data caching capabilities.

If you’d like to see more of PureSystems and other doings at IBM Impact 2012 check out SearchSOA.com’s Impact 2012 in pictures slide show.

Enterprises can use the pre-integrated Sonic ESB and DataXtend SI enterprise solution alone or together with the Progress Actional SOA Management platform, according to the company.

Speed in development is at issue for SOA today, said Bloor Research founder and analyst, Robin Bloor. ”For IT to be successful in supporting business, it has to evolve its approach to SOA to be more responsive, particularly in how it handles change with regard to data semantics and policy,” he said in a prepared statement. At the Progress Revolution 2011 user event last week, he expanded on his thesis that ESBs must improve.

The limits identified for expanded use of SOA and ESBs are several. They include data limitations.

“Initially, SOA didn’t address data limitations, and early SOA implementations uncovered some additional challenges, of which one of them is data – data interoperability issues, data in context, and having a data model that doesn’t need to be changed every time you make a change to an application,” said Colleen Smith. A lot of the focus in the new product combo is meant to specifically address these data limitations, she said in an e-mail message.

Oh, SOA, where art thou? SearchSOA.com has always tried to bring you SOA information ‘warts and all.’ That is, while we champion services architecture as the best way to move the modern software enterprise forward, we look to be objective. SOA has had a long hard journey, and survived a few near death technology experiences.

Like many a technology buzzword that came before, SOA was highly hyped and often oversold. The complexity of SOA deployment disappointed more than a few would-be SOAists in the early years – and they were by no means all of a hype-happy, naive sort. While much evidence shows that SOA has become a mainstream approach, it has had to learn to coexist with many non-services software types that still work just fine.

That SOA is now part of the fabric – that it is somewhat taken for granted – is not a bad thing. Our last SOA survey showed SOA use grew during very hard times and it is strong in both numbers using it and their relative satisfaction with their SOA experience. The low profile of SOA means that more work is getting done.

SOA has come up front and center in the latest buzzword – cloud computing. When you dissect cloud computing you discover that one, it is more than one architecture (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, to name a few, being different breeds of cloud); and, two, cloud itself will have to coexist with a plethora of legacy system architecture for many years. The abstraction of services was intended to address this very diversity in the first days of SOA and Web services. Those who have gone down the SOA highway are now well poised to evolve into cloud computing, if it makes sense.

These days, people may use the term ”services” more than they use the term ”SOA.” But SOA is vital. It is how you work with software. If SOA, in fact, is taken for granted, that may just better go to show its enduring usefulness. The day is coming when you don’t see it, but that is only because it is everywhere. If cloud computing survives to stand on the shoulders of giants, SOA is one of them.

SOA is still going strong. Businesses that already use SOA are expanding their SOA initiatives and new businesses are starting to adopt SOA and to implement SOA technologies. The first-time SOA infrastructure purchase is shifting from ESBs to other technologies.

According to a recent survey from Forrester analytics, SOA “still has strong penetration and high satisfaction rates.” About 75% of enterprise respondents and 80% of small to midsized businesses that responded are planning on expanding their use of SOA. Back in 2009, the Global 200 enterprises had shown a drop in satisfaction. Only 18% responded that SOA was meeting all or most of their expectations. In 2010, this number rose to 33%, which is more in line with earlier years.

The utilities/telecom sector and the financial/insurance sector are still leading other verticals in terms of SOA adoption and satisfaction. Healthcare and public sectors still trail behind the rest of the pack. Geographically, North America and Europe show similar penetration patterns for SOA, but North America shows higher satisfaction rates.

Probably the most interesting finding of the survey is that interest in ESBs – which have been seen as the starting point for SOA architecture – is actually declining. While in 2009, 48% of respondents who had only made a single SOA purchase had an ESB. In 2010, that number dropped to 39%. According to Forrester analyst Randy Hefner, the shift of focus away from ESBs stems from the increasing similarity of SOA specialty products (like SOA management tools and SOA appliances) as well as a desire to make SOA simpler and stronger.

But IBM has added data caching to its Data Power engine. Intel expanded features too. In the latter case, cloud computing is a big driver. And workflow orchestration is the added feature.

That’s what Todd Cramer, director of product marketing for Intel’s SOA products group told us in conversation last year. Cramer said:

“We see an evolution for XML gateways. They first processed XML at wire speed, then [they began] to validate for security. We think in the new environment of the cloud, what you need is an added workflow on top of it. We added a workflow engine. Cloud is the real thing that is changing the game.  Now, a service may be scaled off site to public or private cloud.” 

It is not BPEL-style workflow orchestration that Cramer is discussing – rather, it is machine-to-machine orchestration. It is fair to say the XML accelerator has recently become a more interesting piece of SOA infrastructure. The gateway itself stands at a crossroads.

The typical Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) middleware at the heart of many of SOA implementations itself has drawbacks for real-time applications – while it provides useful transformations it does tend to be implemented as a central node, offering a possible bottleneck and a single point of failure. Variations address some of these issues, and the basic format works well in a large swath of applications, of course.

But alternatives to typical ESBs have been emerging over time. They are found in some of the harshest environments, but may deserve a look-see in less volatile spaces.

Software house Real-Time Innovations (RTI) has been bringing real-time capabilities to middleware for some time, mostly in the world of military applications but also in financial and other markets. Its products natively support the Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (RTPS) wire protocol for peer-to-peer interoperability. 

The company offers software that supports the Object Management Group (OMG) Data-Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS) standard. A driving force behind the DDS effort has been an attempt to bring componentization to the military systems world – where a navy ship may have to serve up to 40 years, and its computer system have to be able to adjust as software architectures evolve over the same 40-year period. RTI has focused on supporting adaptive component architectures, but fast ones.

“Our communication paradigm is a multicast publish-subscribe – our architectural implemenation is peer-to-peer,” said David Barnett, Vice President of marketing at RTI. “We talk directly to other applications with no software itermidary whatsoever.” Yet the APIs support JMS, and RTI provides  a WSDL interface. The company alternatively supports an OMG-defined serializing CDR wire protocol as well.

Uses of the RTI solutions are diverse. The companies software was recently implemented as part of the adaptive optics systems at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT)  in Paranal, Chile. There, more than 1,000 actuators precicesly and continuously deform telescope mirrors to adaptively neutralize the efects of humidity, light pollution and other effects that obscure a true view of the sky. ESO employs the RTI Data Distribution Service for data concentration and analysis related to that process.

The European Sourthern Observatory continually achieves astounding results. Just this month, the researchers at the facility disclosed the most massive stars imaged to date. Located within the Tarantula Nebula, one of these stars, called R136a1, is said to measure 265-times the mass of the Sun.

‘’The exciting thing is that there is nothing new and exciting,’’ said Dr. Chris Harding. With that statement the forum director of the SOA Work Group ironically observed that the hype and ballyhoo of early SOA has given way to a new period where SOA is how you do things if you are an enterprise looking for repeatable results.

Implementation stories, information transfer and experiential practices now form the SOA conversation, and ballyhoo is in much shorter supply. ‘’It’s about how you use it – what people are doing,’’ said Harding. Such was much the tenor at The Open Group Conference in Boston last week, where Harding spoke.

At the event SOA remained a major consideration. Important too were sessions on security, cloud computing and enterprise architecture. Like SOA, EA seems to be going through a new stage of evolution too. Funny, the underlying issues are much the same. Enterprise architects must work to achieve balance between immediate deliverables and long term process improvements, just as the successful services architect must do. Author and researcher Jeanne Ross of MIT told The Open Group crowd that EA was still in some part an art form and that, at the core, the art of EA is figuring out how to meet short-term needs while building for the long term. Read more on Ross in ”Enterprise architecture goes agile?” on the SearchSOA site.

SpringSource has long been a straight-ahead application development play but, as interest increases in the “Platform as a Service” form of cloud computing, that application development platform gains interest to virtualization software provider VMware. Virtual machines are the lifeblood of cloud, after all, but what the heck are they going to run on those bloody machines? Why, applications, of course.

We’ve already seen some odd package pairings in the early days of cloud computing. So we asked Ovum Analyst Tony Baer if he saw a connection between what VMware pledges to do with SpringSource and what we have seen IBM do with its recent CloudBurst appliance.

Baer responded via e-mail:

“If you take VMware Lab Manager, which spins out test images, and combine it with what has become the SpringSource stack, which, besides the framework, includes the compact TC Tomcat Server, and all the development tooling, and webflow frameworks, then you repurpose Lab Manager [ … for runtime], voila, you have VMware’s answer to IBM’s WebSphere Cloudburst.”

People have at times pooh-poohed the influence of development in deciding architectures in a commodities age – make no mistake, the application developer is back in the big game, as this big purchase indicates.

[Stay tuned.]