"We didn't start the fire ... it was always burning since the world's been turning ..." [Billy Joel 1989]. Is SOA the "Same Old Architecture?" or is it "Simply Over Ambitious?" Let's apply SOA's arsenal:: XML, BPM, Services, SOAP, Web Services - to the real world and find out. Let's put out some fires.

Main

August 05, 2008

Challenges/barriers for jumping on to SOA bandwagon for IT firms

Gartner predicts that by 2010, 80% of software revenue growth will come from SOA enabled applications.  With such enormous potential, IT firms are constantly trying to ramp up their potential to deliver SOA as per their clients' need.  SOA is a hard sell as it involves an intimate understanding of both the client's business and their IT landscape.

Continue reading "Challenges/barriers for jumping on to SOA bandwagon for IT firms" »

July 18, 2008

What Difference can SOA make?

Gartner predicts that by 2009, a service-oriented eco-system will mature and provide the foundation for a massive wave of business process innovation. Most organizations today have some level if interest in SOA as a 'future' strategy. However, an early barrier to the adoption of SOA is the appreciation of the difference that SOA can make to the organization. Maturity of SOA adoption  across the globe has not yet reached the level that can provide measurable benchmark for predictable ROI commitment. Hence, the qualitative appreciation of the SOA values can probably play a critical role in the accelerating the momentum of the SOA initiatives. Range of opportunities that SOA brings to table allow organizations to exploit multi-dimensional benefits  from SOA. SOA can make lot of difference to the organization if it is adopted as a mainstream Business-IT framework.

Continue reading "What Difference can SOA make?" »

June 23, 2008

Service Oriented Elephant?

SOA applicability is very dependent on an organization's environment. Recently I got into a discussion about "SOA in the small." Is it feasible? I think not. But IMHO elements of SOA can be applied to the organization to fit into an enterprise SOA roadmap

Continue reading "Service Oriented Elephant?" »

May 28, 2008

SOA-enablement of spreadsheets - is it feasible?

SOA transformation is all very fine, but does is apply to all situations? For example, how do you apply SOA principles to organizations where the multitude of desktop users love the spreadsheet interface and swear by it? Perhaps a better question is, how should you apply SOA principles to environments where users are not looking to share information between desktops, where the ultimate flexibility of your own personal spreadsheet is inherently the differentiator between your product and your competition's, and where SOA is looked on as "Simply Over Ambitious?"

Continue reading "SOA-enablement of spreadsheets - is it feasible?" »

November 16, 2007

SOA and open standards paves the way for Composite Applications

Composite Application presents a new paradigm of application development which promises minimal writing of custom code and enables a business functionality through assembly of ready made components and services “harvested” out of existing enterprise applications and resources. These reusable assets have extension and configuration features or context, which need to be initialized while deploying the asset. Once deployed these would interact with the pre-exiting enterprise application through standardized interfaces and enable a new business use case or scenario. Since the new composite application is built out of pre-existing components and services after customization, the time to market is drastically reduced having obvious implications for the business. Having said that, these new breed of applications have a varied scope and touch points with diverse applications having different security mechanisms and models, database models, transaction models and so on. Hence, the composite has to take care of this distributed aspect which is not quite a simple thing to do.


 

Continue reading "SOA and open standards paves the way for Composite Applications" »

November 14, 2007

Same time last year

Around Nov/Dec 06, I was listening to the SOA insights podcast where there were several views on SOA, Web 2.0 and BPM and whether there is interplay. This was around the same time as Oracle Openworld Show. There was the panel of Steve Garone, Joe Mckendick and Neil Macehiter and there was lot of discussion on the synergy, whether or not they understood each other and most important- were they complementary or competitive. At around this time at Infosys we had already put together our SOA viewpoint and built our delivery capability and won some great references.

Continue reading "Same time last year" »

April 02, 2007

How SOA flattens the (IT) world?

In a flattened world, the organization leverages its global supply chain to effectively source the best capabilities in the most cost effective fashion.  Similarly, in enterprise IT, SOA provides the essential capabilities to have the global supply chain of technology and computing capabilities. The global supply chain helps to source the best of breed capabilities.

Continue reading "How SOA flattens the (IT) world?" »