SOA management

Transactions are the currency for SOA management

AmberPoint has been busy, announcing support this week for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009, and, earlier in the month, announcing integration with IBM WebSphere DataPower. We talked with the company recently. 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

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.

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.

SOA Software seeks governance dominance

SOA Software Inc. says its acquisition of LogicLibrary Inc., announced today, creates “a dominant Integrated SOA governance automation company.”

The two companies were both rated as leaders in respective governance areas by two major analyst firms, said Roberto Medrano, SOA Software’s executive vice president, in making the argument that the new whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Pointing to a Gartner Inc. magic quadrant for “Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets” published at the end of 2007, he said, “Why do we say we’re leaders? It’s not because we say it. Gartner says SOA Software is a leader in SOA governance. LogicLibrary is there as a visionary. The combination of SOA Software as a leader and LogicLibrary as a visionary certainly puts us up there.”

Medrano then points to a Forrest Research Inc. wave chart for ”SOA Service Life-Cycle Management,” published in the first quarter 2008, which shows LogicLibrary and SOA Software in the running for leadership roles in a graphical scrum with IBM, Hewlett Packard Corp., and Software AG. BEA Systems Inc., now being acquired by Oracle Corp., rises above the rest in the Forrester view.

The acquisition of LogicLibrary by SOA Software follows a trend among governance vendors that is likely to continue, writes Dana Gardner, principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions LLC., in his blog today about the deal.

“The merger underscores not only the SOA vendor consolidation trend (ongoing), but also highlights the market driver of more end-to-end governance and management aspects of SOA deployments,” Gardner writes. “HP and TIBCO also had recent announcements that point up a wide and more automated approach to SOA governance/management.”

“What’s more,” Gardner added, ”I expect to see more of this ‘total management’ approach to SOA coming from the open source SOA infrastructure providers, too.”

The strength of the SOA Software/Logic Library combination, Medrano argues is that while the two companies are highly rated on the same analysts’ charts, their technologies are complementary, adding to the greater whole with little overlap.

“There is no real competition between us and LogicLibrary in terms of the assets and products that we have,” the SOA executive said. Concluding that with their product lines merged: “We become one of the few if not the only one that provides the entire SOA governance for all the enterprise assets.”

Alan Himler, who until today was CEO and chairman of LogicLibrary and is now senior vice president, product management for SOA Software, said the combined governance technologies cover more than Web services.

“The beauty of it is that it covers not just services but other types of assets,” he said. “We can offer a solution from the distributed level up to the mainframe.”

The executives of the two companies points to the individual technologies they offered:

SOA Software technology included:

• policy lifecycle governance
• SOA registry, service lifecycle, compliance policy
• operational governance
• service security, mediation, management, operational policy

LogicLibrary offered:

• SOA asset lifecycle management
• SOA development governance and SOA repository
• IDE and SCM integration

Medrano pointed out specific areas where LogicLibrary products will strengthen SOA Software offerings. He said the LogicLibrary Logidex product complements its SOA Service Lifecycle Management position with added capabilities including:

• Compliance policy definition and validation
• Mainframe artifact discovery
• Management policy definition and integrated implementation and enforcement
• Depth of support for service definitions
• Enhanced standards support
• Richer RBAC model and IDM system integration
• Federated identity and trust mediation

SOA Software’s Workbench is strengthened with capabilities from LogicLibrary including:

While financial details of the acquisition involving privately held companies was not released, Medrano said it involved a stock transfer. He said Los Angeles-based SOA Software will maintain the LogicLibrary offices including the Pittsburg, PA headquarters, and the Rochester MN research lab. The majority of the staff will also be retained, he added.

Red Hat buys SOA knowledge transfer expertise

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) expertise is still not available off-the-shelf.

That’s the reason Red Hat Inc. bought Amentra Inc., a integration services provider headquartered in Richmond, VA., which specializes in providing SOA knowledge transfer for its clients. In making this deal, Red Hat is betting that Amentra can provide the consulting services needed to support JBoss,  the middleware company Red Hat acquired two years ago.

In a recent Q&A interview at JBoss World, Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware business at Red Hat, talked about the pain points organizations run into when tackling SOA.

In an interview after the Amentra deal closed this week, Muzilla stressed how important SOA expertise is to the middleware market in general and JBoss in particular.  He said companies making the transition from legacy mainframe or client/server to SOA often lack the expertise in-house to do the job.

“Amentra has a unique methodology focused around knowledge transfer,” he said. “Not only do they help design SOA and help the customer do some projects and implement project, but they also transfer that knowledge so the customer can be more self-sufficient.”

Bradley F. Shimmin, principal analyst of application infrastructure at Current Analysis LLC. agreed that knowledge transfer is one of the strengths Amentra adds to Red Hat and JBoss. Saying that this acquisition is “a perfect fit for Red Hat,” he noted that existing consulting services for JBoss had relied heavily on partnerships, and were not a match for the consulting services offered by the larger SOA vendors, such as IBM. The Amentra acquisition will begin to help close that gap.

Providing consulting in support of JBoss may be critical if Red Hat is too rearch its announced goal of capturing 50 percent of the enterprise middleware market by 2015.

In the blogsphere, Red Hat has received some criticism for its marketing of the JBoss products, which Muzilla sought to clear up earlier this week on Dana Blankenhorn’s ZDNet blog.

After the Amentra deal was announced, Larry Dignan, also blogging on ZDNet, wrote: “The deal, announced Thursday, gives Red Hat some foot soldiers to sell the company’s stack of software including JBoss. which has been a tough sell.” 

Of course, Amentra is not on a par with something like IBM Global Services.

Shimmin notes that Amentra is based on the East Coast and that is where most of its clients are located, although it is doing work as far West as Chicago and Texas. The company is looking at expanding further West to the Pacific Coast. Plans to have any European or international operations seem to fall into the yet-to-be-determine category.

Looking for a few good WSDLs

I recently ran into an architect who was trying to wrap his head around SOA. He had sorted out most of it, but one thing was gnawing at him: what makes for a good WSDL?

Obviously that can change dependent on the service in question, but it dawned on me that a good set of examples would be in order. Thomas Erl has listed some essentials for what should be in a service description:

• the service endpoint
• each service operation
• every input and output message supported by each operation
• the data representation model of each message’s contents
• rules and characteristics of the service and its operations

That’s a great starting point, but it’s no substitute for the finished product. Fortunately there is a reservoir of WSDL expertise out there, namely you, or at least some of you who are reading this. What we’re looking for is your WSDL examples. Send them to us and we’ll publish them so that other architects and developers will have some concrete examples to reference.

It can be WSDL 2.0 or WSDL 1.1. If some of you have tried to use WADL for REST-based services, we’re interested in that as well. You should include an explainer of why you made the choices you did and any key takeaways for those who are referencing your example. What we’ll do is create a specific spot on the SearchSOA.com site for all the submissions, a working WSDL resource center.

Enough people are doing this that we ought to provide them with guidance on how to do it well. You can e-mail submissions directly to  mmeehan at techtarget.com.

REST-based SOA registry tilts at status quo

Last week WSO2 released a REST-based SOA registry, joining Mulesource, which released a REST-based SOA registry in January. Together they’re doing something we haven’t seen a lot of in the SOA space over the past few years: they’re innovating.

So much energy has been poured into establishing standards, building out distinct product markets and fleshing out platforms that it’s been a while since we’ve seen much in the way of innovation. Early in this decade the ESB, the services registry, Web services management software and XML networking hardware pushed the IT envelope. They gave users a way to combine applications in a whole new way. Suddenly component assembly was on the table and loosely coupled, autonomous, stateless, composable, reusable services moved from theory to reality.

The REST-based registry isn’t likely to create that sort of paradigm shift, but it does shake up a marketplace that may be getting a bit complacent. Both of these releases are open source and both try to support the service-oriented concept of discoverability without using the UDDI standard. You might be asking, isn’t SOA supposed to be standards-based? Well, yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean that UDDI has to be one of those standards. REST is built on the HTTP standard. It also opens up the question of how can we better enable the princples of service orientation?

I’m not implying WSO2 and Mulesource have found a better way to build a registry, UDDI may still be the gold standard as far as that’s concerned, but they have opened up the subject for debate by attacking discoverability in a new way. They also might be setting the table for the next wave of innovation in SOA. Going back to a December podcast with Forrester Research’s John Rymer, the area of dynamic business applications begs for real-time innovation. Perhaps Microsoft’s Oslo initiative will break ground in model-driven design. IBM may be unveiling its REST-based Project Zero this spring.

Wherever the innovation comes from, we need to remember that it will come. We’ve been conditioned to think of SOA as a set of products and standards that popped up seven years ago, but what it really entails is an approach to technology that will allow you to best incorporate the next wave of innovation … and the one after that … and the one after that. These REST-based registries may be the precursors of advances to come.

Is there a better way to say SOA governance?

At SearchSOA.com we spend a fair amount of time writing about the importance of governance and how you aren’t likely to succeed with service orientation unless you put a solid governance model around those efforts.

Yet let’s be honest, the term “SOA governance” sucks. It reeks of someone else telling you what to do, hectoring you over every little detail of a project. It sounds about as desirable as a colonoscopy with an IMAX camera.

It’s a particularly sticky term here in the U.S.A. We don’t like a lot of governance. In fact, we get uppity when we think we’ve been placed under the yoke of too much governance. We’ll dump your tea in the harbor when that happens. In fact, you can be sure many project teams have formed some unprintable thoughts about governance without representation.

That said, can we admit that stovepipe application development leads to needless duplication of effort and that it actually prevents businesses from pursuing new opportunities? Being a cowboy sure sounds like fun, but if that’s what you want, then go buy a horse. If you want to work for a company with stockholders/investors and a comprehensive benefits package, then maybe, just maybe, you might want to consider how what you do affects the bottom line.

At the end of the day, that’s the crux of SOA governance – let’s put a little organization around all these disjointed IT efforts in order to make them more profitable. I suspect everyone whose hackles rise at the sound of the word “governance” would agree with that statement. No one wants to be the square peg begging for a hammering. Beyond that, who doesn’t want their work to be considered valuable?

The rub comes in how to sum up all of the things that exist under the heading of SOA governance in a term that doesn’t cause automatic resentment. As ZapThink’s David Linthicum noted recently, SOA governance encompasses a lot of import facets in application development and management. We need to call it something. I’ve heard “productivity” and “business value” tossed around as replacement terms, but those still sound a bit too buzzwordy.

As a believer in the wisdom of humans, though, I figure someone out there has come up with a term preferable to SOA governance. Feel free to inundate us with suggestions. We’ll pool them together and then put together a poll to see which one our readers prefer. Who knows, maybe we’ll come up with something that sounds more like something you want to do and less like something someone else is forcing you to do (or trying to sell you).