Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

Suddenly this year clients are calling me up about SOA Governance, service libraries, service monitoring and control.  First SOA was dead, then SOA governance was dead (even saw an article that SOA governance is more than just dead, it’s a murderer, killing the future by stopping cloud computing).  What’s going on with all my customer calls? Here’s a simple fact about services.  Until a significant percentage of frequently used business processes have been exposed, and exposed at a relatively granular (detailed) level (without being too granular that they require re-composition and orchestration every use), the major SOA ROI (return on investment) doesn’t happen.  Kind of like a real world physical library, it won’t have much traffic until either it has a large collection or a collection of popular material. Most SOA efforts begin Bottom Up, with programmers and projects beginning to use SOA technologies simply because they are available and enable getting...

Reader Francesco Annunziata asked the following excellent question... ERP Vendors are embracing the field of BPM e and SOA. Sooner or later their solutions will catch up with those of current leaders. On the one hand, if they can’t show much deeper integration with their ERP suite than any other BPMS vendor can offer, they will be just another behind-the-curve BPMS struggling for market share (a quote from the Column 2 blog ). On the other hand, If they can take advantage of their ERP by showing a superior capability of integrating their applications I think the BPM deals will by default go to them. Those considerations boil down to my question: Is SOA, among other things, leveling the vendors' playing field in terms of integration and composite applications? In other words, will a potential Client be able to choose a BPM system (and other applications) only considering its capability to meet the company needs, "taking for granted" that the well implemented Service Orient...