It’s amazing what happens you put a few thousand SOA users together. Suddenly you start to get a clearer picture of what service orientation can achieve at both the business and IT levels. That was probably the biggest takeaway for this attendee at IBM’s Impact 2008 conference last week: a lot of users are well down the road with this stuff. They’ve thought about it, put it into action and it’s responsible for a significant amount of mission critical business.

(The other revelation was that the B-52s have a keyboard player who looks like Jose Canseco, but I digress.)

Here’s a smattering of comments made by SOA users at the show:

John Roach, director of architecture and governance at Wal-Mart, focused on using SOA to help manage store stock levels and customer demand. “If SOA doesn’t trace back to you finding the right thing when you walk into our store at the time you need it, then it isn’t material for us,” he said.

Kumar Murugan, application development manager at pharmaceutical manufacturer and marketer Novo Nordisk, talked about centralized policy management and stressed the need to view all SOA projects as part of a continuous process improvement cycle. He also highlighted the importance of having a rigorous QA process.

“You need to do a system discovery for any new service,” he said. “You need to understand how reuse affects your existing services.”

Manny Montejano, CTO at Cars.com, called governance “the key thing we need to resolve to be successful” as his company deals with explosive growth.

“It’s important to say no sometimes,” he said. “You have to let people know that some things are going to be more trouble than they’re worth.”

Anne McDiarmid, CIO for Australian fabric and crafts retailer Spotlight, made a case against trying to solve every problem with a software purchase.

“I’ve got middleware hanging out of my middleware,” she said. “I don’t need more middleware.”

A whirlwind of corporate acquisitions in foreign countries has created an integration challenge for SEB, a Swedish banking and insurance company. Enterprise architect Anders Jader targeted data as a key element in bringing together this international banking conglomerate.

“We are now in a phase where we need to transform everything into one data model and then be able to use that data as a service,” he said.

Tony John, domain lead architect at Allstate Insurance, echoed the importance of data in all things service-oriented, stating “we need more data analysts and data architects.” He noted that the bulk of a $30 million mainframe-to-SAP project “was spent on understanding the data.”

John also made the case that technologists have to understand the business they work for, not just how their niche of IT functions.

“No matter what machine or network it goes through, it’s still a group of people doing some business activity,” he said.

In the world of application development, data is king. Unfortunately many new-fangled approaches to app dev, like SOA, have neglected that importance of turning data into an accessible, reusable resource. This podcast with Marcia Kaufman, partner with Hurwitz & Associates and co-author of Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies, delves into some of the all-too-frequent data mistakes being made by users.

The podcast will cover:

• The drivers for data integration
• Why data needs to be treated like a shared and reusable resource
• The importance of data quality
• Why you need more than an ETL tool to integrate your data
• The necessity for creating a standardized way of handling data

Last week we got flooded with requests to extend the deadline for our Products of the Year Awards submissions. Normally we’d have taken a “no soup for you” stance on this, but when the requests topped the dozen mark we figured we should grant an extension.

Now you’ve got until February 15 to fill out the nomination form. It will push back the announcement of winners until March, but we believe this will be the most comprehensive set of awards handed out in the SOA space and we wanted to make sure absolutely everyone gets a chance to submit.

For those of you who don’t know, we have eight categories:

1. Service design and modeling (including BPM)
2. Service assembly and integration (ESB, orchestration)
3. Service performance (testing, QA)
4. SOA runtime management
5. Data services/integration (including BI)
6. SOA security
7. SOA governance (including registry/repository)
8. Composite application assembly (portal, Ajax, RIA)

Products need to have been released between Dec. 1, 2006 and Nov. 30, 2007. You can check the nomination form for more details, though we highly recommend you explain how the product enables SOA and adheres to the principles of service orientation in your entry.

Let’s face it, service-oriented architecture is boring. I mean, with all that planning and attention to detail and consistency. Maybe that appeals to the small percentage of people out there who lead highly organized lives, but for most humans in your app dev shop the efficiency and better business productivity of SOA isn’t going to set off any internal whistles.

For them the selling point on SOA is that if you get organized over here then you can do some cool, new stuff over there. It’s a tradeoff. You want to do some fantastic enterprise mashup? Guess what? That’s not going to happen until you’ve got loosely coupled applications with easily digested data. It’s the adult equivalent of having to eat your vegetables before you get dessert.

Anyway, we know that plenty of companies out there want to pursue rich Internet and/or composite applications. What we don’t know is how far along you are with that work. So we put together a RIA and composite apps survey to get a better sense of your progress in this area and to find out what sorts of pain points you’re experiencing. It’s quick and easy to take and we aren’t requiring you to provide any intimate personal information (seriously, we don’t want your DNA).

If we know more about your interests and concerns in the Web 2.0, we can better focus our coverage on your needs. Whether you’re working on an internal portal, a trading application or a cool Web site like BreakThru Radio, or even if that’s what your company would like to be doing, we want to know about your RIA experience.

We know you’re out there, looking to push the application envelope, yearning to turn all this organization into something creative. Make sure you chime in on the survey and it will help align our coverage.

Oracle Corp. finally came up with an offer BEA Systems Inc. couldn’t refuse, but the sale is merely a prelude to a pile of “now what?” questions.

The next year in the application development software space will be shaped by this deal. How will BEA fit underneath the Oracle umbrella? What does this mean for open vs. proprietary tooling? Will BEA open new SOA arenas to Oracle or will this create an opportunity for competitors to win business as the Oracle-BEA assimilation takes place? Will SAP react? Will Microsoft react? Will IBM react?

I could go on all day, but I suspect you get the point: Oracle has agreed to buy BEA and the fallout promises to be massive.

Even though this deal has seemed imminent for months, the media and analyst community is trying to sort out the rationale behind it. Over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan’s blog entry notes “Ellison added that BEA will allow Oracle to instantly become a leader in messaging and ‘adds scale to our middleware business.’”

The Eye on Oracle blog from SearchOracle.com speaks with Forrester analyst Ray Wang, who says, “We expect accelerated consolidation along key battle grounds of middleware platforms such as Master Data Management, business intelligence, portals, business process management, and other information management tools. Don’t expect the competitors of BEA to sit still.”

Matt Asay at CNET flogs the conventional wisdom and asks if Oracle’s platform play will drive users toward open source offerings.

On his blog at SpringSource, Rod Johnson speculates that “the Oracle application server, OC4J, is history and Oracle will focus on driving WebLogic Server.” Yet that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s some of the other seemingly competitive products that need to be rationalized:

• Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus
• Oracle BPA Suite, BEA AquaLogic BPM
• Oracle Portal, BEA WebLogic Portal
• Oracle Web Services Manager, BEA AquaLogic SOA Management
• Orace Data Integrator, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
• Oracle JDeveloper 10g, BEA Workshop

That last one is a real sticky wicket in that BEA built Workshop on the open source Eclipse IDE, while JDeveloper is still a fully proprietary offering. Where does the tooling go? Since Oracle bought BEA, you’d have to think this doesn’t bode well for BEA’s open tooling approach. If so, maybe Asay is onto something, maybe this is the end of the “commercial open source” path BEA was trying to navigate.

How well Oracle assimilates BEA and what decisions it makes about mixing and matching the two product lines could either give rise to an application development titan or send customer scurrying for alternatives. One thing it probably can’t afford to do is repeat what it’s done with the 2007 Hyperion acquisition, namely make a big money purchase and then remain mum on how it will fit long term into the Oracle Fusion product line. Hyperion was a complimentary acquisition, bringing business intelligence into the Oracle family. It can stand alone for a while. There’s too much redundancy with BEA for Oracle not to produce a fairly clear roadmap of how it all fits together.

The purpose of service-oriented architecture is to better marry IT to business initiatives … or at least that’s what SOA proponents keep telling us. Yet what are the technologies that enable that? John Rymer, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., has laid out what he calls B3, the essential ingredients for creating dynamic business applications. B3 includes business process management (BPM), business rules and business intelligence (BI).

He recently sat down for a podcast to describe the architectural underpinnings of dynamic business applications.

Topics covered include:

• How SOA supports BPM efforts
• What kind of data BI needs to provide in order to enable real-time business agility
• What kinds of business rules need to be prioritized
• How BPM, BI and business rules can work together
• A sensible starting place for those looking to create dynamic business applications

Anyone interested in finding out more about this subject can get a free copy of Rymer’s report on Dynamic Business Applications from Forrester.

It’s probably a sign of our times that we view BEA Systems Inc. as a little fish unable to defend itself against larger predators in the software industry ocean. According to its 3rd quarter financial report, BEA is on track to rake in $1.5 billion this year. It still needs to prove in the 4th quarter it hasn’t been crippled by Oracle Corp.’s $6.7 billion October takeover bid, which it rejected, but a conversation I had last week with a BEA customer proved enlightening.

The customer in question, a CTO whom I contacted on a totally separate matter and wished to remain anonymous, believes BEA’s approach to technology can help it weather this storm.

“They adhere to standards and their tooling is open enough that we see no reason to stay away,” he said. “If a change we didn’t like occured after a takeover, we don’t feel like we’d be locked in with BEA. They get loose coupling. We could unplug from them if we had to.”

His basic argument was that BEA has become open enough and embraced heterogeneity to the extent that it can continue to compete for customers based on functionality. It’s got a service-oriented defense system.

“We need technology that works,” he said. “This takeover drama might be interesting to Wall St., but it has nothing to do with my projects. From a user standpoint, BEA was in more trouble four or five years ago when we weren’t sure if they were going to embrace more open systems. They did and because of that we’ll continue to look at them.”

He reinforced what we already know, BEA has proven successful at selling software during the past decade and it shouldn’t be taken for granted that users will stay away from a vendor that has delivered for them in the past. This isn’t some overly leveraged wannabe without the means to support itself. BEA has been a viable player in the app dev space.

Here’s something I wrote in October about why Oracle might want BEA:

While there’s massive overlap between BEA’s offering and Oracle’s Fusion line, BEA does have three particular strengths that Oracle might be looking to leverage: data services, internal portals and external transactions. Those were the three most popular types of service-based applications our users reported they are either working on or plan on undertaking in the next year. Even more importantly, the demand for these types of applications increased sharply with respondents who reported their companies had achieved some measure of architectural maturity. In other words, the farther along users are with SOA, the more important those projects are likely to become.

BEA has its AquaLogic Data Services Platform, it has its WebLogic Portal product as well as the portal functionality it acquired when it bought Plumtree Software in 2005, and it has the Tuxedo transactional business on which it built itself. So the BEA goose might be sitting on a few golden eggs … and that’s not a bad pet for a would-be giant to have.

Yet if that’s a good set strengths for Oracle to buy, then it’s also a good set of strengths for BEA to have. If a user has a data services, portal or transactional project in the works, then BEA (which reports that more than 60% of its revenues are derived from services) stands to be a player.

While the Oracle bid surely staggered BEA, don’t be surprised to see BEA do a fair job of fighting back this quarter. The fact that it has enough going for it to be a takeover target also means it might have enough going for it to fend off Oracle’s advances.

Web services and composite applications, like traditional monolithic apps, rely on data. Without the right data at the right time, the service/application has nothing to execute. In this podcast, Nexaweb Inc. COO David McFarlane talks about how composite applications involve much more than just some slick tools that make eye-popping front ends. He touts data integration as a key element in composite application development and the creation of dynamic user interfaces.

Listen to the podcast

Among the topics covered are:

• The semantic technical challenges involved with data integration
• The organizational governance needed to facilitate data integration
• The creation of real-time, event-driven UIs
• Event-level integration in mashup services
• The role of business intelligence in composite development and service agility
• What constitutes a true rich user interface