Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

Jim Sinur at the Gartner Blog Network notes that Application Package Vendors and BPM Vendors are beginning to encroach on each other's territory. How so? Package Vendors are beginning to incorporate some level of process control, and exposing the fact that they have tremendous vertical market expertise in the business processes incorporated into the application (exposing as SOA services and exposing as marketing). Who better than a vendor that's been creating CRM software for 20 years to understand the automation of CRM business processes? BPM vendors are beginning to accumulate some significant libraries of business processes. As such, they're beginning to arrive with "industry kits" that contain common process sets for specific vertical markets - turning the BPM system into a partial package application for that industry. Further enhancing this is BPM's primary focus at allowing easy adjustments to the process - equivalent to complete customization of t...

While I was working as a senior manager in a Fortune 500 IT department, we went through a recession, and a few years later through the U.S. outsourcing offshoring trend. During the 2001 recession, management reacted with reasonable downturn planning. Business management requested a certain level of cutbacks (say 7%) and IT listed projects that could reasonably be cancelled. Things difficult to cut back (without very serious planning) such as operations - keeping the lights on, normal systems maintenance & support operations, planned regulatory system work, and required upgrades (due to vendors end-of-support-life), these were all off limits. New development and system enhancements were on the line. IT management also reacted in a normal downturn mode. Middle IT management had gotten a bit fat, so they trimmed middle management. For the remainder, they turned to their managers and instructed them to lifeboat. Those employees who weren't considered key - who weren't a subject...

I'll be a featured speaker at: The CTO & IT Architects Forum February 23, 2009 8:30 AM Crowne Plaza Hotel - HaYarkon Tel Aviv, Israel My topic: Is SOA Dead? No SOA ROI? Getting SOA Value instead of SOA Buzz Here's a link to the event flyer (in Hebrew). The presentation will be in English. Hope to see you there.

(Continuing the discussion of Batch Processing and SOA.) This article focuses on USING services (consuming a web service) as part of a batch oriented process. As mentioned in Part 1 , there's a strong tendency to want to consume (web) services as part of a newly developed batch process - usually due to reuse (other reasons discussed in the Part 1). It's pretty natural to say "well, services are reusable, and here we have a process that needs to use them. So, use them." However, there's a natural architecture incompatibility that has to be address. Web services are, by nature, remote. Batch process are oriented around local processing of large quantities of data/transactions, by marshalling large amounts of local resources to maximize the throughout. Here's an example to explain better... In the ancient days of programming, say before 1990 or so, the majority of systems were built using local files. Relational databases didn't exist yet, or were just...

Two weeks ago, Zapthink published a fluff piece Batch Processing with SOA (by Ronald Schmelzer). The article says just two simple things: 1 - You can make batch process controls into callable services. 2 - On-demand batches ("workload automation") are the future of batch processing. The article ignores what are the key topics of a batch SOA conversation, namely: A - Can web services be utlized in the context of a batch process (or workflow automation or whatever you want to call it)? B - Can an ESB provide an enviroment for a batch process, or a significant portion thereof? In other words, is there a convergence between batch processes and SOA integration tools (web services, ESB, or even governance)? Can these respective spaces leverage one another, or are they fundementally incompatible? This issue has come up in the context of two clients within the past 2 weeks. The first question usually asked is WHY? Why would you consider an ESB in the context of batch processing? ...

My wife sat next to my 9 year old daughter sharing a moment of watching a video on Youtube. My daughter watched, came to a part that she didn't enjoy as much and slid the play-slider up to another part. My wife responded by saying "that's really annoying, you learned that from your older sister." I paused her and explained that for my daughter, media is an on-demand experience. Pick what you want, watch it, skip parts you don't want, rewatch parts you particularly enjoy, and share it with friends & family with a click. Whereas my and my wife's experience is broadcast media. You watch (or listen) to what comes on, watch it from beginning to end, and if you missed it - oh well. We don't interact with or adjust our watching experience - she does. (I've actually been in the car with the radio on and had my children say "could you pause it and put that back, I didn't catch what he said".) Clearly for those in the media business this poses ...

Dr. Jimmy Schwarzkopf (IT analyst) wrote... Today I visited a client whose IT budget is no more than 1.6% of its revenues. His boss asked him to cut 20% of the capital investment and 10% of the operational budget (a total of 10% compared to budget 2008). In order to do this the company will stop projects that could have increased revenues, some that could reduce costs and some cuts would increase the risk of IT failures. Now my thoughts: By cutting 0.16% of revenues (as expenses) the company lost much more. Does it make sense to cut IT without a real analysis??? Clearly this company has designated IT as a pure expense center and utility service provider. As far as the business management is concerned, IT is no different than: Facilities Management - Tell them to cut and they can eliminate the office plants and cut back on window cleaning. Cleaning Service - Tell them to cut back and have a somewhat less clean office. Security Service - Lock a few more doors inconveniencing how peopl...

While IT analysts and pundits are busy declaring SOA is dead, SOA has failed, and the downturn killed SOA, the hype of 2009 is Cloud Computing and the resurgence of Software as a Service (SaaS). ( Microsoft Azure being a prime example.) In my discussions with my corporate clients, as well as from my own extensive corporate history, I'm finding that allowing key corporate data and processes to leave the walls of the company controlled data center is the main mental barrier to SaaS and Cloud Computing. Even though companies are outsourcing business processes and the associated data that goes with them - as well as outsourcing some applications to hosting providers - the thought of deploying their applications to an amorphous cloud and depending upon the vendor to just "support and provision it appropriately" is a mental leap they're not yet prepared to make. Similarly, relying upon services that a vendor will just "support and provision appropriately" is a...

The article of the year is from Ann Thomas Manes at The Burton Group: SOA is Dead, Long Live Services. Nothing like a provacative title to get your attention. SOA from a vendor perspective is whatever tool they are selling in the space: ESB, Design Time Governance, Runtime Governance, Policy Management, Registry & Repository, etc. What they always sell is the tool, never the process. Since the A in SOA is Architecture, and the true value of SOA is SOA for the Enterprise (as opposed to SOA for Integration ), it takes implementation of a SOA architecture pattern to get the hyped SOA benefits. But as noted above, this is not what vendors are selling. As most organizations focus on SOA for Integration and layer on a few tools rather than applying architecture and an organizational change process (which, face it, is hard), only incremental benefits will be gained. This is not a surprise, IT managers are rarely rewarded for shaking things up and taking risks. Much of SOA is about c...

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...