Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

SOA and IT News of Note will be an occasional article here at Making SOA Work. Modeling SOA can be a challenge. Good news, the folks at OMG have been working on it... Highlights: "It's an extension of the UML, the Unified Modeling Language, and it contains modeling constructs for things like contracts and service and providers and consumers, all things that you would expect if you were going to do the architectural delivery for a SOA-based project," The specification will be published as a UML profile, meaning it can be used in any UML modeling tool. It can be extended and built upon, Harrison said. Tools vendors are expected to incorporate it in their products, A little more at Infoworld.

Why is a Cisco router $10,000 and a Linksys router $100? Or perhaps the better question is why are your network guys willing to pay $10,000 for a Cisco router when a Linksys router can be purchased for $100? The answer is that Cisco routers have multiple layers of reliablity, managability, and security that Linksys routers don't. But 100x (100 times) difference? Is it really worth 100 times difference? The network is the backbone of your IT infrastructure. If your network goes down, all the IT systems stop working and so does much (if not all) of your company's operations. And keeping that up, being alerted early to problems, being able to reroute and resolve problems, that is indeed worth 100 times difference. When creating traditional big-box applications, the traditional components are: The Application You Wrote The Container or Runtime The Application Server The Database The Database Server (When we move to an application with a web GUI, you can add a web server in ther...

Jim Sinur at the Gartner Blog network writes... BPM portends to make process work easy and some activities / technologies are fairly simple to work with in process improvement. Process modeling is a great example of this principle. While getting the correct process model and getting all stakeholders to agree to it is certainly a challenge, but the BPM tools supporting process modeling are deceptively easy to work with in the modeling arena. Business professionals get real excited when they see their processes and find ways to cut costs and time out of them. It’s all good, right? The problem is that this gives business professionals the impression that this is pretty easy stuff. When the processes involve composite processes that require significant IT support to complete, things do not move that fast. BPM actually gives the false impression that things are easier than they look... It gets much more difficult when the some of the process goes below the water line a needs web service or...

I spent years in a huge Fortune 50 IT division creating an integration competency center, trying to convince project managers and IT middle management to use SOA. Or rather, to expose services offering their key application functionality. These managers often came to me requesting access to services or for us to build services allowing them access to the systems, transactions or data they needed. But when I came to them to expose their systems, transactions or data, or even more to build a service model into new application features and extensions they were working on, they almost uniformly said no. When I arrived with a request for a specific transaction with funding in hand, they would do the minimum required by the requesting system and no more. I struggled with this for years. I created presentations educating on the SOA model, showing benefits and ROI. I educated architects and senior programmers on the advantages. I spoke with systems analysts about new SOA design patterns. When...

As we reach mid-December, the next phase of the U.S. economic situation is upon us with 3 distinct new areas: #1 The retail industry make 60% of their yearly PROFITS through the December holiday sales season. The majority of stores, especially upscale stores, are having their worst holiday season in over 30 years. With the middle of December now upon us, many of these businesses have to decide how (or if) to stay alive. They'll turn to massive sales to clear out their inventory, and come January 2 will begin scaling back sales help and closing stores. The manufacturers, watching these store trends for tracking next year production planning, will anticipate a drop in orders coming for 2009 leading to cuts in production and staff. While corporate America has been taking preparatory steps for a major downturn with major layoffs (and of course the financial and real estate sectors have been dealing with the direct impact), the retail side of layoffs begins now and continues through mid...

A major utility customer called and requested to meet with a SOA expert. I was called to meet with the customer and determine what they needed. The customer's fancy new headquarters is an architectural masterpiece. Pleasant and interestng to look at on the outside, neat "smart building" features on the inside. On entering the meeting, the customer team got right to the point, "We aren't doing SOA and want to know if we should be." They explained they had a high reliability requirement and an existing high reliability environment. Taking it a step further, they have an OLD high reliabilty environment... majority IBM mainframe, MQ for messaging between apps when they're not on the same environment. I explained the advantages and goals of SOA, such as: - Ease Integration - Flexibility - Enable Real Time Processing - Enable Real Time Data Accessibility - Reuse --- Single Service Instance --- Single Installation --- Single “System” for Single Business Functio...

One of the repeated topics of the Innovation World conference was the world economic downturn. As a vendor, Software AG is looking at customers and prospects across the conference table that have scaled back IT projects, cut IT staff, and are hunkering down in survival mode. During the conference, Software AG worked hard at building a marketing case that SOA is the way to go during an IT downturn... BPM lets IT and the business whip up new business functionality with a few clicks. BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) lets IT create a window for the business to see key operating metrics in a dashboard like setting (with the potential for detailed drill down). Sounds good in theory, though they struggled a bit as they haven't yet clearly formulated their message. What's the reality? BPM relies on a platform of services and functions which can be readily tapped to drive the process. Further, and this is the failing in many a BPM installation, it relies on the processes being w...

I attended Software AG's Innovation World 2008 held in Israel this week. I haven't had a chance to take a look at Software AG's strategy since about 2 years ago, when I was working intensely with Webmethods which Software AG purchased. Attendee's are pretty firmly divided between Software AG's mainframe product lineup, namely Adabase and Natural, and Webmethods customers (or those looking forward towards SOA technologies). While Software AG has been extending their legacy product line to offer mainframe transactions as web services, they're clearing focused on Webmethods as an ESB and BPM provider as their future. While the conference lineup had a number of senior Software AG people, including some technical Ph.d's, the tone of the conference was decidedly marketing. Customer success "movies" were presented throughout. Presentatons were very high level overviews with much marketing fluff. The only presentation with any technical information was...