{"id":14,"date":"2006-03-17T12:35:06","date_gmt":"2006-03-17T20:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=14"},"modified":"2006-03-17T12:35:06","modified_gmt":"2006-03-17T20:35:06","slug":"infoworld-soaexecforum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/infoworld-soaexecforum\/","title":{"rendered":"InfoWorld SOAExecForum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s 2006 SOAExecForum<\/a>\u00a0held in San Francisco brought together many of the innovators leading the push towards SOA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One theme that echoed throughout many of the presentations and discussions throughout the day was the idea of “Start Small, but Think Big”.\u00a0 Build a master plan and implement incrementally.\u00a0 An advantage of the SOA approach is that it needn’t be adopted monolithically like an ERP system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

SOA\u00a0is something that can be phased in gradually, but there was the emphasis that to do it right it needs to be done thoughtfully.\u00a0 Implementations that are\u00a0developed\u00a0with only a single\u00a0point-to-point solution in mind tend not to be implemented well for general reuse.\u00a0 It’s important to take the time to design individual services in a way that promotes and encourages their reuse by future processes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The day\u00a0started off with a\u00a0keynote by Transamerica Life Insurance’s<\/a> Jeff Gleason<\/a>, Director of IT Strategies for the Annuities Products and Services Division.\u00a0 Jeff outlined how he led TLI’s migration from a ‘project-based’ culture (project-based architecture, project-based tools, project-based iDEs…)\u00a0into one that flows from a single overall architecture.\u00a0 He\u00a0preferred not to emphasize enabling technologies like WSDL, UDDI and SOAP, but rather to consider business processes and reusability.\u00a0 That was a theme that many of the other presenters also echoed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The TLI approach was very methodical in creating a Business Architecture Map using tools like IBM’s Rational RequisitePro<\/a> and Sun’s Composite Application Suite<\/a>.\u00a0 Using these tools TLI breaks down their processes into actors, business events, and business functions.\u00a0 He defined events as anything that caused a change in state of the business and functions as the process that is performed due to a change in state.<\/p>\n

Jeff was followed by BEA’s<\/a> Bret Dixon.\u00a0 Brett pitched BEA’s AquaLogic and also presented a number of statistics from InfoWorld that showed a trend towards more wide-spread industry acceptance and a growing number of pilot projects based on SOA.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Interestingly,\u00a0Brett\u00a0showed the results of a survey where\u00a0BEA, IBM and Microsoft\u00a0came out as\u00a0the perceived leaders in the SOA space, with Oracle and SAP dragging behind.\u00a0 The survey was across 558 large companies having 20,000 or more employees.\u00a0 Neither Oracle\u00a0nor SAP had a presence at the conference,\u00a0so maybe the perception is correct, but it surprised me that Oracle wasn’t\u00a0seen as a leader in the space.\u00a0\u00a0The reason for the\u00a0perception is probably\u00a0because of Oracle’s strong push to be\u00a0the end-to-end provider of enterprise applications\u00a0like their Oracle Application Suite<\/a> and their on-going\u00a0Fusion project<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0And there were quite a few digs throughout the day by presenters at the signature high-budget approach of monolithic ERP systems.\u00a0 The audience of the survey probably pegged Oracle solely in the ERP\u00a0camp, which is partly true,\u00a0but on other fronts\u00a0Oracle<\/a>\u00a0has actually been a strong promoter of both SOA and standards.<\/p>\n

Brett also saw SOA in most cases as being a technology that works well via gradual adoption.\u00a0 Many enterprises adopt a “multi-phase, multi-dimensional roadmap”.\u00a0 He saw very few companies approaching SOA as an ERP-like “Mega Project”.\u00a0 Brett quoted the Home Depo slogan: “You can do this”.<\/p>\n

The idea of “going slow” and wisely selecting components that have strong potential for reusability fits in well with Formtek<\/a> strategy.\u00a0 Formtek has created services<\/a> for managing and versioning Content and Documents.\u00a0 Maintaining a link to content is a requirement of almost any business process.\u00a0 Implementing\u00a0the capability\u00a0once and making it available for resuse across many processes is a smart move.<\/p>\n

Various other case study success stories were highlighted throughout the day at the conference.\u00a0 These included Merrill Lynch, PG&E, Rockwell, Ameriquest Capital, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.<\/p>\n

In Jeff’s keynote, he pointed out one problem that they’re still working through is to address SOA security, in particular whether it needed to be applied at the Services Level or whether it was something that should be applied at the Composite Application Level.<\/p>\n

Throughout much of the rest of the conference, security of services came up again and again.\u00a0 Somewhat surprisingly, of the\u00a0roughly 15\u00a0sponsers of the event, five of them are building hardware to support SOA infrastructure\u00a0and SOA security.<\/p>\n

Types of things being moved into hardware include XML parser acceleration, Security Processing, Clustering, Threat Detection (especially Denial of Service via XML threats — something that XML is very susceptible to), and Cryptography.<\/p>\n

Vendors with hardware offerings included Cisco, Intel, IBM, Layer 7<\/a> and Reactivity.\u00a0 The souped up routers and hardware appliances are in effect becoming “XML Firewalls”.\u00a0 The Layer 7 people, led by their Director of Architeture, Scott Morrison, seemed to have a good command of the issues<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 As one of the drafters of WS-Security,\u00a0Scott has unique understanding and insight into what is involved in implementing Security.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite having been involved in the drafting of the specs,\u00a0Scott see the WS-* specifications as very onerous on the application\/service developer.\u00a0 The many specifications are very complicated and oftentimes appear to be contradictory.\u00a0 They are also still evolving and changing.\u00a0 It is too much to have to ask developers to have to keep up on the details of the current services spec and to then implement the spec\u00a0in their service to guarantee that\u00a0the implementation\u00a0complies fully with the spec and\u00a0is fully interoperable with other components.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Moving security out of software and into the hardware layer makes sense and guarantees a common approach when dealing with any service, no matter which vendor or group created it.\u00a0\u00a0 The Layer 7 offering lets application programmers program to the WSDL of the service without having to program to an intermediary that includes security concerns.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday’s 2006 SOAExecForum\u00a0held in San Francisco brought together many of the innovators leading the push towards SOA. One theme that echoed throughout many of the presentations and discussions throughout the day was the idea of “Start Small, but Think Big”.\u00a0…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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