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.

At its Impact 2008 event, IBM today launched a REST-based development environment called WebSphere sMash, based on its open source Project Zero. sMash supports both the PHP and Groovy scripting languages, the latter was chosen in order to “attract the Java developers,” according to Jason McGee, IBM distinguished engineer and chief architect for WebSphere sMash.

It creates a serverside runtime for RESTful services. The browser-based development tools allow for REST-based components to be exposed via Ajax with the Dojo toolkit. McGee said the goal of the project had been to create a simple, intuitive component model for developers looking to create RESTful services. There is a developer guide, which goes into the nitty-gritty on runtime management, RSS/ATOM support, REST API documention, configuring data access and dozens of other topics.

Some good news for those looking to do more with REST development is that sMash won’t be a standalone REST offering inside the Big Blue product ocean.

“We look at REST enablement as a core capability across the IBM portfolio,” said Kareem Yusuf, director of product development for WebSphere sMash. WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo made the same vow, promising that REST support will be driven across IBM’s platforms, particularly on the SOA front.

“We’re systematically going through our product line and REST-enabling everything from MQ to CICS, DB2, WebSphere Application Server and on and on. This liberates these products and the content they represent to the Web,” Cuomo said. “With all that content dangling out on the Web, programmers can now agilely write new applications by interacting with those programs.”

Using sMASH coders can mashup content and then deploy it as a Web application, he explained. Mashups developed with the Project Zero technology also lend themselves to being hosted in a Software as a Service (SaaS) mode, Cuomo said.

“So Zero as a service is the next thing on the horizon,” he added.

The scripting language support should lower the barriers to entry for developers looking to try sMash.

“It’s not a new language people have to learn,” McGee said.

A limited community version will be available through the Project Zero website and the full version, with support, will be available on a license model.

For a developer level take, check out the TSS.com discussion of the sMash release.

Joining sMash in the Web 2.0 offering mix is a new product called IBM Mashup Center, designed for non-technical line of business users. It combines Lotus Mashups technology on the front end with the InfoSphere MashupHub on the back end. Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and Web interaction hubs at Lotus, said the product is designed to put mashup technology in the hands of knowledge workers, enabling them to pull information out of enterprise applications (like ERP and CRM) and combine that with market data and other 3rd party applications.

“The differentiator is we know where all that information is at,” Bowden said, noting that mashup development has become a hotbed for venture capital investment.

A visual wizard tool will allow users to create RESTful services and widgets without having to know specific programming languages.

The overwhelming theme coming from IBM on the opening day of its Impact 2008 event is that SOA isn’t about the technology. It sounds a bit odd to hear that message coming from a company with more SOA-related software and hardware products than anyone can count, but Big Blue deserves some message purity points for noting that SOA isn’t per se a technology initiative … even if it is more than willing to sell you a mother lode of technology in the pursuance of SOA.

Yet it also has some new technology to show off in front of the 6,000 attendees at the Las Vegas conference, which produced a standing room only crowd this morning at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. One of the highlights is a new business process management (BPM) suite. According to Tom Rosmilia, vice president for WebSphere software, the suite will be available during the second quarter of 2008. It will feature modeling, monitoring, process accelerators and asset repository capabilities.

The product itself comes from IBM’s January purchase of AptSoft Inc. and it will be called IBM WebSphere Business Events. True to its name, there’s lots of event-driven architecture under the covers. That fits into the second generation SOA vision pitched by senior pice president and group executive for IBM Software Group Steve Mills. Beyond event-driven services he stressed high performance transaction systems, low latency, integrity and scalability as the most in-demand functionality for an SOA growing in size and responsibility.

As with most of his comments during the day, Mills made sure not to offer any magic bullets. In particular, he noted that an ESB alone won’t net you a working SOA.

“The very nature of this is bringing multiple things together to make an environment work,” he said. That sort of business process unity marks IBM’s current efforts. Mills noted that goal comes on the heels of an endemic condition where IT shops “have effectively fragmented the ownership of information technology across the company.”

Rosamilia urged users to “take an iterative approach. Build it up over time and make it little bit better with each pass because you won’t get it right the first time.”

Tomorrow the company plans the commercial launch of its REST-based Project Zero initiative.

Marketers in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world seem to be  falling all over each other to make their new products Web 2.0 buzzword compliant.

Although Web 2.0 is a dubious term technically since there is no real Web 2.0. It is a clever catchall phrase for the more glitzy browser applications that emerged originally with wikis, and blogs, as well as Podcasts, which is another buzzword for downloadable digital audio files.

A chart of Google Trends data on Web searches indicates that Web 2.0 first came on the scene in mid-2004, when SOA was already flying high as a frequently searched topic. But after sliding under the radar for the next year, Web 2.0 took off like a rocket in late 2005 and surpassed SOA in the fourth quarter of 2006. Since then Web 2.0 has been the more popular term.

So it is perhaps not surprising that marketers are hyping their Web 2.0 capabilities in product announcements.

This week in announcing OpenLibertyJ , its open sourcing of Liberty Alliance security and privacy framework the major emphasis was on Web 2.0. SOA got only one mention in passing.

Asked why the big emphasis on Web 2.0, Brett McDowell, executive director, Liberty Alliance, said: “From my perspective service-oriented architecture is a concept that immediately resonates and gives you a vision of applications if you’re an enterprise architect. Web 2.0 gives you a vision of applications that are taking the Web by storm. What we wanted to use is the term that’s going to convey the correct expectation of what this framework is meant to enable.”

But that didn’t mean OpenLibertyJ had little or nothing to do with SOA.

“It absolutely enables the identity bus for SOA,” McDowell said. “But I think a broader audience understands the vision of Web 2.0.”

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst for ZapThink LLC., was asked if this explanation was more about marketing or technology.Replying by email, Bloomberg wrote: “Technically correct or marketingese? Well, both. 100% marketingese with just enough truth mixed in :-).”

The Liberty Alliance is not alone in hitching a product wagon to the Web 2.0 star. Since 2006, Oracle Corp. has been talking about the convergence of the Java Enterprise Edition and Web 2.0 into something Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s senior vice president, called SOA 2.0.  

That term does not appear to have caught on, as a request to Google Trends brought back this reply: “Your terms - SOA 2.0 - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.”

In 2007, Oracle began using the term Enterprise 2.0 for the Java, SOA and Web 2.0 convergence that is bringing wikis, blogs and social networks into the corporate world. Since first appearing on Google Trends charts in the fourth quarter of 2006, Enterprise 2.0 has been a hotter topic in Web searches than SOA 2.0. But when compared with SOA and Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is still a flat line under their arcs.

If Oracle with its marketing muscle cannot get SOA 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 off the ground, we may be stuck with Web 2.0, nebulous as it may be.

Discussing IBM’s SOA and Web 2.0 marketing strategy this week, Stephanie Martin, new worldwide lead for IBM Developer Relations, which includes more than 6 million coders who frequent the developerWorks Website, says she believes the two terms can play well together.

“They’re both very hot topics in the market right now,” Martin said. “In order to have the Web 2.0 experience, SOA is critical for designing and architecting these applications. That’s where I see the link between SOA and Web 2.0. Certainly they are not the same thing. SOA is the enabler of Web 2.0 but I do not see one replacing the other. We’re seeing our community’s interest in both those technologies growing consistently.”

So it appears SOA and Web 2.0 will have to co-exist as buzzwords, at least, until the next hot term is coined.
 

I was looking at the IBM Impact 2008 site and between the cascading images of Drew Carey and the B-52’s it dawned on me that SOA has arrived.

Say what you will about the imperial excess IBM has planned for the MGM Grand in Las Vegas next month, but Big Blue is not the type to throw around its cash like a young rapper with a hit record. IBM’s always been a buttoned-down operation. It’s not shelling out for Hollywood A-list comedians and multi-platinum selling bands on a whim. Rest assured, the only reason it’s writing the fat check for this event is because it’s making a fatter pile of money on its SOA business.

Impact is an SOA show. It doesn’t pretend to be anything but a deep dive into service orientation. Last year in Orlando IBM turned out roughly 4,000 attendees for Impact, making it easily the biggest service-oriented architecture event in history. If anything, the Vegas Impact conference looks ready to dwarf it. While it may not be quite as large as the Interop show slated for later in the spring, that one vendor can assemble that much humanity for one technology track is beyond impressive.

The event boasts 220 customer presentations. Think about that, it’s more customers than you see at a lot of shows and we’re only talking speakers.

A lot of us folk in the media play this game about when SOA will “arrive,” when it will enter the majority adoption phase? Well I’ve got a Drew Carey, B-52’s, MGM Grand, 220 customer speakers, and thousands of attendees that says SOA already has arrived … and it’s about to get the kind of platform we haven’t seen in the IT industry since the heady days of the dot-com boom. Some may say Impact exhibits more of the signs of the irrational exuberance of the dot-com heyday, but we’re not talking about some flash-in-the-pan vendor trying to gin up business in a red-hot economy. This is old money putting on the ritz during what is tantamount to a recession.

The appropriate response, after “Wow!”, should be “Looks like IBM’s making buckets of money on this SOA thing.” And if IBM’s making that kind of coin, it means a whole pile of users are hip-deep into their SOA installations. That should only become clearer next month as a few thousand people are shaking it to “Dance This Mess Around”.

Last week WSO2 released a REST-based SOA registry, joining Mulesource, which released a REST-based SOA registry in January. Together they’re doing something we haven’t seen a lot of in the SOA space over the past few years: they’re innovating.

So much energy has been poured into establishing standards, building out distinct product markets and fleshing out platforms that it’s been a while since we’ve seen much in the way of innovation. Early in this decade the ESB, the services registry, Web services management software and XML networking hardware pushed the IT envelope. They gave users a way to combine applications in a whole new way. Suddenly component assembly was on the table and loosely coupled, autonomous, stateless, composable, reusable services moved from theory to reality.

The REST-based registry isn’t likely to create that sort of paradigm shift, but it does shake up a marketplace that may be getting a bit complacent. Both of these releases are open source and both try to support the service-oriented concept of discoverability without using the UDDI standard. You might be asking, isn’t SOA supposed to be standards-based? Well, yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean that UDDI has to be one of those standards. REST is built on the HTTP standard. It also opens up the question of how can we better enable the princples of service orientation?

I’m not implying WSO2 and Mulesource have found a better way to build a registry, UDDI may still be the gold standard as far as that’s concerned, but they have opened up the subject for debate by attacking discoverability in a new way. They also might be setting the table for the next wave of innovation in SOA. Going back to a December podcast with Forrester Research’s John Rymer, the area of dynamic business applications begs for real-time innovation. Perhaps Microsoft’s Oslo initiative will break ground in model-driven design. IBM may be unveiling its REST-based Project Zero this spring.

Wherever the innovation comes from, we need to remember that it will come. We’ve been conditioned to think of SOA as a set of products and standards that popped up seven years ago, but what it really entails is an approach to technology that will allow you to best incorporate the next wave of innovation … and the one after that … and the one after that. These REST-based registries may be the precursors of advances to come.