Andrew White

Gartner’s SOA & Application Development and Integration Summit, London, UK

I sat in a vendor presentation today on SOA.  Specifically the presentation was focused on SAP and how SOA oriented was its technology stack.  I asked a question of the speaker that was not pointed to SAP, but to SOA in general, and the role of MDM was to SOA.  You see, I have an opinion that much of SOA’s promise wont be realized if the underlying data in the various data silos are not semantically consistent (ie governed by MDM).  

The answer I got stunned me: “MDM, for me, [he said] is really just a set of services that will be governed in a SOA framework”.  I was stunned since MDM is not really that at all.  MDM is a discipline that seeks to simplify the integration landscape by assuring semantic consistency across data stores.  So if a service “get customer” is orchestrated to work with a service designed and even delivered by a different source, “charge customer”, the actual definition of “customer” is the same (the easiest part) and ultimately, the actual instance/observation of each customer instantiated across the two data stores (order file, accounts receivable file) when the services are executed, are consistent.

After I got over my stunned response, I realized that the speaker may or may not agree with this, but I realized that he really over simplified the implementation of MDM.  Of course, MDM will be implemented as a series of services, but this was really only half, or maybe 10% of the story.  It maybe that the speaker realizes that there is much more to MDM than that, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to respond from the perspective of the execution of the MDM technology.

I had a couple of 1-1’s where I talked about our vision for the multienterprise business process platform (ME-BPP).  The vision is something we (myself, Benoit Lheureux, and Debbie Wilson coined) have been talking about for some time; that, over time, the center of gravity of many business processes, is moving outside the firewall for many firms.  This is consistent with the hype in the past with SaaS and now with Cloud computing.  Each is another wave of enthusiasm for accessing things from outside the firewall.  A ME-BPP is a governance infrastructure where a community (think supply chain, value chain, industry or some other community of interest) shares in the organizing, governance, and use of a set of data integration, business services, and business applications, to help support multienterprise business processes.  The ME-BPP represents a long, slow burn that will lead to large swathes of consolidation in the B2B industry.  Some vendors like e2open, Sterling Commerce, and wesupply, look and smell like emerging ME-BPP’s.  But ME-BPP’s are not technology that firms buy; it is an alignment of technology that describes how they are used.  Technology plays a key role nonetheless.

More to follow…