Vendor Multi-Product Confusion

For some years I've been dealing with IBM SOA oriented products. About 3 years ago I had a chance to be in an IBM center and discuss their EBS product strategy with some top IBM SOA experts. As IBM had (and now has even more) products in the space, I was trying to make sense of where to position which product that was being pitched to our large enterprise IT. At the end of the conversation I was not successful.

Recently I was speaking to a top MDM expert about Oracle's product strategy in the MDM space. I was commenting on Oracle's "product", for which I had recently received a vendor pitch. He responded that Oracle has 5 products competing in the MDM space (and primary MDM tools).

Today I'm trying to produce an architecture model for a medium sized IT shop that purchased IBM DataPower to include within their existing SOA model (and fit with existing tools). In my search I came across this slide from IBM...

I see... one product provides fast connectivity, another connectivity, and another universal connectivity. Well, that clears it right up (sarcasm).

A number of the large vendors have gotten into the model of developing and/or buying up a number of products in a given technology space, and then figuring out what to do with them later. In the meantime they peddle the whole group, but can't provide a coherent strategy.

Good for me, more consulting and architecting to be done. But bad for the IT enterprises that have to figure out what's a fit versus the vendor salespeople ready to sell anything.

Integration Spaghetti™

I’ve been using the term Integration Spaghetti™ for the past 9 years or so to describe what happens as systems connectivity increases and increases to the point of … unmanageability, indeterminate impact, or just generally a big mess. A standard line of mine is “moving from spaghetti code to spaghetti connections is not an improvement”. (A standard “point to point connection mess” slide, by enterprise architect Jerry Foster from 2001.) In the past few days I’ve been meeting with a series of IT managers at a large customer and have come up with a revised definition for Integration Spaghetti™ : Integration Spaghetti™ is when the connectivity to/from an application is so complex that everyone is afraid of touching it. An application with such spaghetti becomes nearly impossible to replace. Estimates of change impact to the application are frequently wrong by orders of magnitude. Interruption in the integration functioning are always a major disaster – both in terms of th

Solving Integration Chaos - Past Approaches

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From Spaghetti Code to Spaghetti Connections

Twenty five years ago my boss handed me the primary billing program and described a series of new features needed. The program was about 4 years old and had been worked on by 5 different programmers. It had an original design model, but between all the modifications, bug fixes, patches and quick new features thrown in, the original design pattern was impossible to discern. Any pattern was impossible to discern. It had become, to quote what’s titled the most common architecture pattern of today, ‘a big ball of mud’. After studying the program for several days, I informed my boss the program was untouchable. The effort to make anything more than a minor adjustment carried such a risk, as the impact could only be guessed at, that it was easier and less risky to rewrite it from scratch. If they had considered the future impact, they never would have let a key program degenerate that way. They would have invested the extra effort to maintain it’s design, document it property, and consider

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