soa

Companies are not only aware of the number of enterprise architecture designs but will soon embrace their diversity, according to a new report from analyst firm Gartner.

Gartner analysts predict that 95 percent of companies will support multiple approaches to enterprise architecture (EA) by 2015 and that the majority of clients will need to support a mixture of more than one of these approaches based on their business needs.

The important thing to note is the realization that enterprises will have no choice but to blend these architecture types into one larger strategy. Gone are days of attempting to strictly … Read more

IBM released new analyst data on Monday that shows Big Blue is the market share leader for service-oriented architecture (SOA) software, capturing nearly 75 percent of the market. This follows news last week detailing IBM's 31 percent overall middleware market share.

And while it's not surprising that IBM has a large share of the middleware market, what's notable is that much of the company's recent success has come with an added bonus--taking away Oracle customers.

Oracle introduced its Fusion Middleware product roadmap in 2008, which included the amalgamation of several acquisitions, including BEA and Plumtree. However, … Read more

"Cloud computing" is so overused and overhyped that it doesn't really mean anything anymore. It's has become kind of a vague "what comes next in IT" label, with no specific meaning, applied indiscriminately to whatever the latest vendor to stop by wants to sell us today.

I now hear this complaint with great regularity--but I don't entirely agree. Sure, every vendor is eagerly "cloud washing" whatever products or initiatives they have to fit in with the latest buzzhype. And the "cloud" term is thrown around with pretty reckless abandon. … Read more

IBM decided to close 2009 with a bang by acquiring Lombardi, a privately held provider of business process management (BPM) software. Big Blue racked up a number of acquisitions this year including: data discovery software firm Exeros, database security firm Guardium, security provider Ounce Labs, and analytics provider SPSS.

Lombardi marks IBM's 90th acquisition since 2003. That's a lot of companies to digest.

With Lombardi, IBM strengthens its presence in BPM by effectively capturing the customers it doesn't already have. IBM currently has more than 5,000 BPM customers in about 30 countries and growing.

According to Lombardi CEO Rod Favaron, the company has about 300 enterprise-level customers with a high percentage shared with IBM. Lombardi has a shockingly impressive customer list, including Allianz Group, Aflac, Barlays Global Investors, Dell, FETAC, Ford Motor, Hasbro, ING Direct, Intel, Maritz Travel, National, Bank of Canada, National Institute of Health, Safety-Kleen, T-Mobile, UCLH, and several governmental agencies.

It's generally been a quiet year for technology merger and acquisition deals with the 2009 value total for tech M&A activity reaching $142 billion, according to recent data from technology investment research firm The 451 Group. To provide context, the second quarter of 2008 alone saw $173 billion in tech M&A deals. The median deal size in 2009 was $40 million, contrasted with a median of $43 million in 2008 and $100 million in 2007.

From January to November 2009 there were only 31 technology transactions valued at $1 billion or more, and The 451 Group reports that all of the high-multiple deals took place in the second half of 2009, resulting in M&A spending running 50 percent higher than in the first two quarters. Notable deals include Dell's purchase of Perot Systems and Cisco Systems' pair of $3 billion acquisitions in October. … Read more

information technology is expected to play an important part in the global economic recovery, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

Some 72 percent of business and information technology executives say their "organizations place greater value on the IT function today than they did before the economic crisis" and that they "view IT as an important part of their economic recovery efforts," according to Accenture's Global Survey on IT Investments.

This is not an unfamiliar sentiment and is one we've heard from United States CIO Vivek Kundra as he's attempted to use IT to kick start a variety of programs on the federal level that will set the pace for innovative new uses of technology across the globe.

The results of the Accenture survey are similar to last week's Goldman Sachs cautiously optimistic survey results that suggested IT spending would trend upward in 2010 and normalize to pre-recession levels with the majority of countries represented planning to increase investment selectively next year.

… Read more

It's been said that information technology is a fashion industry--that we just keep following the latest hype and fads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year referred to cloud computing this way.

Ellison loves this dig, and he uses it least once every technology generation. He's not alone. I, however, disagree with the entire curmudgeon corps' "It's just hype!" attitude.

While it's true that we in IT have our fashions, just like any field of human endeavor, we're generally pretty practical. It's hard to see either IT's executives or its technicians as … Read more

As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.

The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series … Read more

MuleSource, the company behind the top open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) and a leading open-source service-oriented architecture (SOA) vendor, has been without a chief executive for some time, having lost the services of CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg in September. On Monday, the company announced the appointment of Greg Schott as its new CEO.

Schott may familiar to those who follow the sometimes-incestuous open-source talent pool. That's because Schott joins MuleSource from SpringSource, where he was senior vice president of marketing.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Schott had served as senior vice president of marketing and vice president of corporate development … Read more

Web-oriented architecture (WOA), a descriptive term for a subset of service- oriented architecture (SOA), has recently arisen as the next buzz-phrase to help further confuse the IT architect.

WOA is simply a way of implementing SOA by creating services that are RESTful resources, allowing any service or data to be accessed with a URI. (REST, by the way, stands for representational state transfer. And URI is short for uniform resource identifier.)

For many scenarios, this method dramatically simplifies things over the traditional WS-* approach. WOA resources are stateless and self-descriptive. Additionally, building SOA across intra-enterprise and in-the-cloud services becomes much easier with WOA.

As defined by Gartner's Nick Gall (thanks to Rob Eamon for the pointer): Long version: WOA is an architectural style that is a substyle of SOA based on the architecture of the www with the following additional constraints: globally linked, decentralized, and uniform intermediary processing of application state via self-describing messages.

Shorthand version: WOA = SOA + WWW + REST

To be clear, the WOA approach is not ideal for every scenario. As with any architectural style, there are trade-offs. Any application that requires a real-time, event-based action or response, for example, can't be easily built in the WOA way (at least without crippling the system with constant polling). For the enterprise architecture with any level of complexity, no one approach will fit all needs.

Add in the inevitable enterprise mix of legacy applications, existing investments in SOAP-style SOA, and point-to-point integration infrastructure, and it becomes clear that the true pure-play WOA will be all but nonexistent. … Read more