Pro wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper immortalized the words “Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”

Now we at SearchSOA.com are asking you to do the same thing, sort of. It won’t involve wearing a kilt or smashing a coconut over anyone’s skull. We just want you to ask some good questions.

We’ve recently revamped our site experts roster and we’re looking to put them through their paces. The way it works is you ask a question and we send the question off to an expert to get you an answer. It’s a fairly illustrious list of folks:

• SOA standards and architecture - Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group
• SOA governance and BPM - Sri Nagabhirava, founder and chief architect nLeague Services
• SOA infrastructure - Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions
• RIA and enterprise mashups - Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink
• SOA testing and QA - Rami Jaamour, product manager of SOA solutions at Parasoft
• Data services - Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research
• SOA development - Chris Haddad, vice president and service director at Burton Group

They’re already producing some top flight insight, like data integration best practices, where grid intersects SOA and the difference between WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. Yet good answers like that depend on good questions from the user community. We sift through heaping piles of “What’s the difference between an application server and a Web server?” (a perfectly legitimate question, but we answered it back in 2003) in order to get some of the top minds in the SOA space the best questions the user base can generate.

The process for submitting a question is simple. Just go to the topic where your question fits and click on “Pose a Question.” That will take you to a question submission form. After that, it’s as simple as typing in your query. Keep us busy. We like it that way.

Java EE 6, now in the development stage, needs to embrace the service component architecture (SCA) specification, argues Sanjay Patil, standards architect at SAP AG.

The Java Community Process Web page for Java EE 6 indicates that SCA is being considered for the next version of the enterprise platform. So in a conversation at this week’s Java One with the SAP standards guru, SearchSOA editors asked Patil if consideration should move to implementation.

Should SCA be part of Java EE 6?

“I certainly think it should,” Patil answered. “The main reason is SCA is really about assembling applications in a technology neutral way. If it was about a specific platform, such as Java EE, you could say there are enough APIs and libraries for Java applications. But if you look at the key value of SCA it’s about recognizing the fact that customers have different technologies, Java EE, BPEL, BPM systems, traditional EAI systems. They have a variety of communications mechanisms including Web services, JMS, and EDI.”

Facilitating SOA development in these heterogeneous environments was the driver behind the creation of the SCA specification by a vendor group that included SAP, IBM, Oracle Corp., and BEA Systems Inc. SCA is now making its way through the standards process at OASIS.

While there was a dearth of official talk about enterprise Java in the Java One keynote, Patil said the Java Enterprise Edition will be a major player in service component development.

“One of the main component technologies is going to be Java EE,” he said. “Our NetWeaver product is based on Java EE 5. So in our view it is important that Java EE support this high-level composition standard, SCA.”

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.

Things Kate Pierson surely never thought she’d say during a concert when the B-52s were taking off 30 years ago: “Happy birthday WebSphere!”

Now, THAT is what I call a mashup.

Artists who debut high on the Billboard charts plugging your products is also what happens when a company pulls off a big show, which is what IBM has done at Impact 2008. It’s easy to be cynical about these sorts of events. In fact, I’m paid to be cynical about pretty much everything. It’s a job requirement. Yet it’s impossible not to notice all the users in attendance and presenting in the sessions. Anyone who doubts whether SOA is happening at the corporate level only needs to spend an afternoon here and it will quickly prove that SOA is not only happening, but it’s happening in a big way.

After four days I’m starting to wonder if there’s a company that isn’t pursuing service-orientation. One interesting observation from a senior IT exec with whom I had lunch the other day was that a lot of his developers and IT ops people probably don’t even know the company is heading down the SOA path because the higher ups don’t use the term. The company just happened to build a loosely coupled, modular order-to-cash process. Only the folks with an enterprise architectural view tossed around the SOA acronym. Everyone else was working on an order-to-cash overhaul.

By the way, this is how SOA dies — not with obsolescence, but with ubiquity.

The event has also generated a ton of coverage. Dana Gardner has a great recap of the first day highlights in his BriefingsDirect blog. In it he’s got a killer quote from WebSphere GM Tom Rosamilia:

“You can do BPM without SOA, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” says Rosamilia.

I’ll note here that SearchSOA.com did a special report on this very topic two years ago. Business process management has always been a good idea, but without service orientation it’s largely unimplementable. How you compose those processes and manage them is critical.

In his OnStrategies Perspectives blog, Tony Baer recaps his conversation with IBM software head honcho Steve Mills about whether SOA is getting boring and then talks about the parallels between SOA and enterprise databases.

There’s yet another parallel between SOA and the evolution of databases. Twenty years ago, there were debates over whether SQL databases could handle the load and deliver the performance of legacy databases or file systems. The answer was throwing Moore’s law at the problem. Today, there are similar questions regarding SOA, because if Web services standards are used, that means a lot of fat, resource-hungry XML messages whizzing around. Mills’ answer is that there’s a glut of underutilized processing capacity out there and a crying need for virtualization to make that iron available for XML.

A lot of software-oriented folks tend to miss out on how much of a role hardware has to play in SOA. We’re talking about architecture here, not software. Hardware, networks, databases, storage — each one comprises a major component of the enterprise architecture. IBM’s talking about monster transaction volumes this week, the sort of thing you’d associate with TPF. So don’t be surprised if you’re in an app dev meeting in the future and you’re sitting next to the corporate mainframe guru and a data architect. Comfortably living within the artificial barriers created within IT shops is probably a luxury you won’t enjoy much longer. Those imaginary cubicle walls are coming down.

James Taylor has been a one-man Impact blogging machine this week over at Smart (enough) Systems. One entry covered a customer panel comprising Michelin, The Hartford, Health Care Services Corporation and the U.N.

Randy [Wallace from Michelin] discussed how far they had come from having a very small percentage of IT spend aligned with key business goals (6%) to one that is much more so (81%). For instance, in the past business units in different regions picked i2 and Manugistics at the same time and both were implemented resulting in separate systems. A stronger governance process and overall architecture are now established, driven by business ambitions and regularly updated. Far fewer and more focused projects as a result. Senior executive user satisfaction has risen steadily.

Here’s where I note Michelin sells tires. We’re not talking about a financial services company that stands to make a killing if it can combine information in new and dynamic ways or some Web business. These folks have a supply chain, logistics and customer care to manage and they’re finding value in SOA. This is why I really start to wonder who isn’t doing this stuff. It’s working in the tire business. The tire business!

Floyd Marinescu has a great summary of IBM’s “Smart SOA” vision up at InfoQ. In it, he lists five SOA best practices that IBM showed off a few times during the event.

1. Linking business and IT from the beginning. Set the business vision first and see how IT can support it.
2. Develop an architecture with a vision for the future. Not just one that will satisfy one process or one LOB, but something that can work over time.
3. Skills and culture, governance.
4. Scalabilty and process integrity – how do you plan for the spikes?
5. Maintain end-to-end operational visibility

That’s a solid list. I’ll add one of my own, make the QA folks a central player in all of this. I don’t think I’ve spoken with one person over the past year who claimed to have a working SOA who didn’t tell me that service-oriented QA was essential. You’ve got to know what to test, what architectural principles need to be followed and whether your service can be expected to meet its service-level agreements. From everything I hear, it’s one thing to say that, but no mean feat to do it.

As such, it won’t surprise me overly much if at Impact 2009, IBM is pounding away on the theme of quality SOA.

And speaking of new themes, there was a presentation on “Green SOA” that I admittedly didn’t make, but there is a summary of the presentation up at Greenmonk Associates blog. The nut of the case made by RedMonk’s James Governor for “Green SOA” is:

My argument at the event is basically that if SOA is a means to better alignment between IT and the business, then we should also drive sustainability into the mix. Componentising services gives you freedom to leave, for example, potentially allowing you to swap a provider out for a greener, or more importantly from a bottom line perspective, more energy efficient service.

Now that is what I call a forward-thinking take on the whole consumer-provider relationship. At the end of the day, that’s what SOA is: an arrangement between producers and consumers. People classically think about it in IT terms. IBM is pitching it in pure business terms, but the model can be extended beyond that. Choice is perhaps the greatest product of a truly decoupled world and, as Governor points out, profit isn’t the only choice on the menu.

Defining your terms makes a world of difference when a project manager is modeling a business process, says Debra Berard, program manager for business excellence, Lean/Six Sigma at Seagate Technology LLC.

The bugaboo that also haunts data integration projects — you say “bill,” I say “invoice” — is something project managers need to solve in business process modeling for application development.

A recent example  Berard offered was the design of Seagate’s failure analysis common tracking system (FACTS) application, which is used to find the root cause of failures in product design or manufacturing so they can quickly be corrected.

In a competitive business like disk drive manufacture the quicker a failure can be remedied, the quicker a new product gets to market.

To develop the FACTS application required WebEx meetings and conference calls with stakeholders from all the Seagate facilities involved including manufacturing sites in Thailand, China, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as design centers in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and Singapore.

During these meetings, the project manager captured the processes that existed in the various locations using a business process modeling and analysis tool, the newly released Metastorm ProVision 6.1  enterprise modeling product.

The first thing the analyis revealed was the while Seagate’s goal was to have one failure analysis process, there were approximately 25 to 30 different processes in the company.

But after further review, that wasn’t as bad as it first looked.

“Come to find out, we did have a lot of processes,” Berard said. “but what was revealed was that they were really doing the same process, but calling the activities different names.”

So the issue was resolved in the conference calls by getting all the stakeholders around the world to agree to call the failure analysis activites by the same set of names, she said.

Once that was done a common model for FACTS was created, which then became the requirements document for the $5 million application development project.

Now, everybody involved in failure analysis at Seagate uses the same terminology as well as the same Web-based FACTS application.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) expertise is still not available off-the-shelf.

That’s the reason Red Hat Inc. bought Amentra Inc., a integration services provider headquartered in Richmond, VA., which specializes in providing SOA knowledge transfer for its clients. In making this deal, Red Hat is betting that Amentra can provide the consulting services needed to support JBoss,  the middleware company Red Hat acquired two years ago.

In a recent Q&A interview at JBoss World, Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware business at Red Hat, talked about the pain points organizations run into when tackling SOA.

In an interview after the Amentra deal closed this week, Muzilla stressed how important SOA expertise is to the middleware market in general and JBoss in particular.  He said companies making the transition from legacy mainframe or client/server to SOA often lack the expertise in-house to do the job.

“Amentra has a unique methodology focused around knowledge transfer,” he said. “Not only do they help design SOA and help the customer do some projects and implement project, but they also transfer that knowledge so the customer can be more self-sufficient.”

Bradley F. Shimmin, principal analyst of application infrastructure at Current Analysis LLC. agreed that knowledge transfer is one of the strengths Amentra adds to Red Hat and JBoss. Saying that this acquisition is “a perfect fit for Red Hat,” he noted that existing consulting services for JBoss had relied heavily on partnerships, and were not a match for the consulting services offered by the larger SOA vendors, such as IBM. The Amentra acquisition will begin to help close that gap.

Providing consulting in support of JBoss may be critical if Red Hat is too rearch its announced goal of capturing 50 percent of the enterprise middleware market by 2015.

In the blogsphere, Red Hat has received some criticism for its marketing of the JBoss products, which Muzilla sought to clear up earlier this week on Dana Blankenhorn’s ZDNet blog.

After the Amentra deal was announced, Larry Dignan, also blogging on ZDNet, wrote: “The deal, announced Thursday, gives Red Hat some foot soldiers to sell the company’s stack of software including JBoss. which has been a tough sell.” 

Of course, Amentra is not on a par with something like IBM Global Services.

Shimmin notes that Amentra is based on the East Coast and that is where most of its clients are located, although it is doing work as far West as Chicago and Texas. The company is looking at expanding further West to the Pacific Coast. Plans to have any European or international operations seem to fall into the yet-to-be-determine category.

SearchSOA.com has gone international. Just recently we launched a version of the site in China. Now, technically speaking, we don’t have a billion new readers on the site, but you get the idea: namely, we’ve launched the site in the most populous nation on the planet.

Apparently a lot of those emerging businesses in China are thinking it might make sense not to build a haphazard and unmanageable application infrastructure. Imagine that? These companies might actually start with a well-conceived reference architecture and adhere to the basic principles of service orientation. They might be employing the best practices covered in our Service Orientation for Architects School inside those pristine greenfields with which they get to work.

It’s actually not the most comforting notion when you get right down to it. You’ve got who knows how many emerging companies looking to run IT as a profit center instead of a cost center. What if they’re agile and you’re not? How many partnerships will you miss out on? How much business will go to someone else? Suddenly the world isn’t as flat as Thomas Friedman theorized. Instead you’re surrounded by mountains to climb in every direction.

It should be fascinating to see how SOA adoption goes in China. Will the Ertan Hydropower’s Yalong River Dam project be the standard over there? If so, then app dev really will have entered a new world order.

Of course, maybe we’ll confuse our Mandarin readers as much as we help them. For instance, when our lead writer Rich Seeley makes a reference to Yogi Berra at the top of a story, it could cause people to think Yogi Berra is some famous IT guru whose wisdom must be sought out … and that could be a big clog in their machine.

For the past two years, we at SearchSOA.com have been told regularly by our members (numbering 450,000+ these days), that you need help with governance. Apparently the mechanics of running an SOA is one of the biggest challenges users face.

That’s no surprise, the reuse, performance, management and ownership aspects of SOA are, literally, a sea change for a lot of IT organizations. This is business as unusual.

With that in mind, we’ve put together our Pragmatic SOA Governance Seminar, a free one-day event which covers the design time, runtime and business aspects of SOA governance. The material is geared toward key decisions makers in your IT organization - CTOs, enterprise architects and app dev managers. The seminar will go beyond theory and focus on actionable steps you can take to achieve SOA governance right now.

The dates and locations of the seminars are:

• February 21, San Jose, CA
• February 26, Reston, VA
• February 28, Mt. Laurel, NJ

Those interested in attending need to submit a registration form or call Lauren Nickerson at 781-657-1782.

One of the leading lights in the SOA community, Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, will be presenting the main sessions. In addition there will be a user case study presented in each of the three cities: Transunion in San Jose, the Department of the Interior in Reston and Synovus Financial in Mt. Laurel. Each of these users has gone through the hard work of implementing an enterprise-wide SOA and will share their hands-on experiences about best and worst practices when it comes to SOA governance.

We’ve taken pains to make sure this seminar won’t be the standard boilerplate presentation of SOA governance with some vendors then saying all you need to do is buy Product X and your governance needs will be solved. These events will identify specific governance pain points and offer up sensible solutions. At SearchSOA.com we hold ourselves to a high standard. Just as we take pains to give you independent, in-depth of SOA-related news (instead of repackaged press releases), we’ve made sure that you can walk away from this seminar with a laundry list of SOA governance action items.