Application Architecture, Development & Integration

I am pleased to announce that Jeff Schulman is chairing the June ADI event. I’ll let him give you some opening remarks and some early plans for the event. Even before last week’s event concluded Jeff enlisted me as one of his track managers so before one is over the other begins.

We welcome your feedbak on how to improve the event and I welcome Jeff as the new Conference Chair.

Thank you and Happy Holidays, Anthony Bradley

Last week we held the Gartner Fall Application Architecture, Development and Integration (ADI) Summit in Las Vegas. This is our SOA flagship event. By many attendee accounts the summit was a great success. I’d like to wrap up the fall conference with a few bottom lines (this may look familiar to those who saw my opening keynote) that deserve gleaning.

SOA is indeed a journey and in the keynote I used a personification analogy of building a strong relationship between SOA and IT. Therefore, sticking to the analogy, I asked the audience to think of the conference as a three day relationship building retreat with the keynote as the initial counseling session to kick off the retreat. I played the role of SOA and asked Sue Landry to play the role of my relationship partner IT. I also asked Roy Schulte to join us as our relationship counselor. We then put on a little “play” addressing the major relationship challenges between SOA and IT. We talked about the following IT/SOA relationship challenges:

1. I Don’t See What I Get Out of This Relationship with SOA
2. IT Isn’t Ready for This Relationship
3. SOA Does Whatever It Wants (I Can’t Control It)
4. IT Has Too Much Baggage
5. IT Won’t Change
6. I Don’t See a Future in a SOA Relationship
7. IT Is Trying to Move Too Fast in This Relationship

The Bottom Line takeaways that goes with each of these challenges are:

1. Build SOA business cases and measure success
2. Actively mature your organizational SOA competency; don’t simply deploy SOA technologies
3. Use governance as the guardian of SOA success
4. Capitalize on SOA as a reason for and path toward IT modernization
5. Instill new application development thinking and behaviors to realize SOA agility and shareability benefits
6. Explore SOA’s evolution to augment your road map and derive deeper value from SOA
7. Employ an SOA road map to grow SOA incrementally as a key part of your applications strategy

I’m reiterating these because they are the major messages of the conference and the 70+ presentations, workshops, and round tables were all about working on improving these competencies.

I hope the conference was a productive and enjoyable experience. See you in June at the next ADI summit!

Thank you, Anthony Bradley

Here are some findings and follow-ups from Benoit Lheureux on one of his analyst/user roundtables:

Thank you very much for your participation in the discussion about B2B / SOA today. I really appreciate that everyone actively participated, and was pleased that we were able to reach the three interesting (and at least in one case non-intuitive) Findings, which I’ve pasted below (with a few edits for readability, but hopefully without changing the meaning).

Finding 1: Companies immediately (rather than in the near or far future) need to deal with B2B SOA in their B2B projects. 

Finding 2: Some external business partners are beginning to demand SOA, regardless of existing industry standards.  [or, as one of you said another interesting way, “you might need to put SOA lipstick on your existing industry standard pig”]  J

Finding 3: Within industry standards, the payload specifications are more valuable than the protocol / delivery specifications – given that alternative protocol / delivery specifications provide sufficient security and quality of service.

I’d also like to acknowledge Suresh’s insightful observation that (and I paraphrase from memory – please post a correction if I got it wrong) that “a portfolio approach of about ½ dozen ways of doing B2B works best”. I couldn’t agree more, and you’ll see that I discuss this in much of my research. 

In my opinion these are pretty interesting Findings, and have a material bearing, for example, on each of your B2B strategies. For example, because of these Findings you might conclude that you’ll both leverage existing content industry standards, e.g., ACCORD, and deliver the payload using both whatever protocols are pre-approved for ACCORD but also using other techniques, e.g., Web services, once you ensure you’ve got enough security & QoS.

Because you’re all Gartner clients as well I’ve also pasted below links to my B2B research index and a few pieces of research that are related to our discussion, although I also recommend that you all check out research from my colleague Frank Kenney, particularly related to SOA governance, and SOA testing – topics that came up but that we didn’t have time to cover in detail. To make it easier to find relevant research on multi-enterprise (B2B) integration please review my research abstracts online at http://www.geocities.com/benoit_2001/B2B_Research_Index.htm or by simply double-clicking on the attached HTM file. In particular, the following research notes should be relevant to our discussion today:

·         Hot Questions About SOA From Asia – November 19, 2008 (G00161363) à Answers to frequent questions on SOA that I was asked on a recent trip to Asia

·         SaaS Integration: How to Choose the Best Approach – October, 1, 2008 (G00161672) à A decision framework to help SaaS customer choose the best approach to SaaS integration

·         Toolkit: Request for Proposal for B2B Gateway Software – August 26, 2008 (G00154852) à An Excel-based tool (with graphics!) to facilitate your B2B Gateway Software RFP process

·         Magic Quadrant for B2B Gateway Providers – June 3, 2008 (G00157460) à Our rating of 14 B2B Gateway Software (think: evolving EDI software) vendors

·         Magic Quadrant for Integration Service Providers – May 28, 2008 (G00157093) à Our rating of 14 Integration Service Provider (think: evolving EDI VAN) vendors

·         Key Issues for Multienterprise B2B Integration, 2008 – March 11, 2008 (G00155781) à The definition and scope of Gartner’s B2B Multienterprise Integration research agenda

I also welcome Gartner research inquiry on this and related B2B topics anytime – just contact the Gartner quickpath at the number below to schedule that.

Cheers,

-          bjl

P.S. Please contact me directly @ Benoit.lheureux@gartner.com if you have any trouble using my research index. I also welcome knowing whether (or not) it was useful to you!

I’m sitting in Jess Thompson’s SOA Technology Alternatives session (note: you can see the slides I mention below by following the preceding link).  He has done a nice job of putting a number of technologies into the overall context of what it takes for an SOA initiative to succeed.  All the technologies come together on slide 14, which contrasts these technologies across 10 major dimensions.  The most intriguing technical trend is clearly the expanding breadth of ESB Suites and how that will bump into BPM Suite evolution with appliances being an interesting alternative view of putting a number of things ‘in a box’.

He then goes on to highlight that lack of effective governance is the number one reason that SOA initiatives are perceived as failing.  This led to a discussion on a SOA Center of Excellence as well as the importance of managing your SOA Assets and Artifacts.  Personally, I believe these latter points are absolutely critical.  It’s all too easy to focus on the enabling technologies at the expense of focusing on the enabling management disciplines, skills, and behaviors that are required for SOA success.

To see more on these subjects, check out the following sessions:

• Selecting Backplane Infrastructure Technologies to Support Your SOA and BPM Initiatives
• Case Study: Transitioning to SOA
• Riding the SOA Tiger: Practical Governance for SOA
• SOA Horror Stories

In the last couple of days, I had meetings with 8 different federal and state government organizations.  As with commercial entities, many government IT groups struggle to get broad participation and true buy-in with respect to basic SOA concepts such as re-use.  Everyone is happy to pay lip service to the ‘goodness’ of sharing web services and leveraging capabilities across various parts of a government.  However, when push comes to shove, many hide in their bunkers and hope that SOA is another one of those things in the ’this too shall pass’ category, just like objects and earlier initiatives came and went.

Interestingly, I ran into three examples where breakthroughs occurred when SOA leaders looked beyond sharing within their government.  Instead, they looked at providing services to external constituents like businesses, consumers and other governments.  Suddenly, they ran into opportunities to actually charge a small amount of money for things like a service that allowed a new business hoping to get started to fill out a few common forms rather than dozens and dozens of forms.  This bit of funding and the notion of common cause that kept yet another government inefficiency story out of the papers, got several of the recalcitrant players to actually play ball!

With that in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight the sessions that Benoit Lheureux is doing on B2B at the Summit:

• How to Modernize Your B2B Infrastructure
• Best Practices for Multi-Enterprise Computing
• Best Practices for B2B SOA

Open Source continues to increase as a force in the applications world.  Just as an example, it is fairly rare to find a development environment that doesn’t have eclipse present in some way.  Countless other Open Source projects have found their way into many of today’s homegrown and packaged applications.  Legal questions continue to be raised, which Mark Driver recently blogged about in Good Books On Open Source Legal Issues.  However,  Mark will cover two more important questions in the following sessions:

• The Role of Open Source in Modern SOAs
• When and How to Adopt Open Source Software (Analyst/User Roundtable)

In my travels, I continue to run into people that are just getting started with SOA.  If you’re in this camp, you should have a quick read of our SOA Overview.  Then check out the track of sessions dedicated to Initiating an SOA effort.

As Dan Sholler points out in the track keynote,  the key things to keep in mind are:

• The fundamentals of SOA are agreements
• The major opportunities for SOA are where agreements already exist
• Focus on projects that address clear business pain

One of the most interesting new areas of research that I have seen is the work led by Bill Clark on Context Delivery Architecture. The notion is to have applications take into account the “context” of the user, such as their location or previous behaviors.
It made me think of a great little “flashmob” video of Grand Central Station. (Check this post for more on flashmobs) This is a great example of a change in context! Imagine the potential of taking into account information outside of the main process or transaction that someone is focused on…there is tremendous potential to bring new business value to the table. This becomes really interesting when combined with Event Driven Architecture concepts, which you can see in the Event Processing Scenario presented by Roy Schulte.

Yesterday I did an open to the public audio teleconference presentation on the subject topic. It was attended by about 200 of the people to whom we reached out. The slides are available in .pdf form at  http://www.gartnerinfo.com/aadi/slides.pdf.  In a day or two we will have audio also. I’ll update this post when we do. Any comments on the presentation are welcome.

This presentation also served as an overview or primer for the content we will deliver at the Application Architecture Development and Integration Summit in Las Vegas from Dec 8-10.

In Dan Sholler’s recent blog post “SOA Survey Says..” he blogs about some of the recent analysis he (i.e., Gartner) is publishing on our 2008 SOA survey. It is worth a read. He will be presenting on his findings at the AADI conference in this presentation “The State of SOA: What Are Your Peers Actually Doing?” on Wednesday at 10:45 AM.