Enterprise Architecture - Presented by Computerworld & InfoWorld

Dr. Chris Harding leads the SOA Working Group at The Open Group - an open forum of customers and suppliers of IT products and services. In addition, he is a Director of UDEF Forum, and manages The Open Group’s work on semantic interoperability.

Recognizing the importance of giving enterprises quality information at the point of use, Dr. Harding sees information interoperability as the next major challenge, and frequently speaks or writes on this topic.

Dr. Harding has a Ph.D in mathematical logic, and is a member of the British Computer Society (BCS) and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Prior to founding MuleSource, Dave Rosenberg served as Chief Information Officer for Glass Lewis & Co., a leading investment research and proxy advisory firm. Rosenberg also served as Principal Analyst for the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux.

Previously, Rosenberg was Programs Director for LinuxWorld and Comdex and held technology and marketing positions at Sprint, OmniSky and NorthPoint Communications. At OmniSky his work on wireless provisioning systems was awarded a U.S. Patent. He contributes regularly to leading industry and business publications, including BusinessWeek, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, CNET, ZDNet, Release 1.0, Slashdot and IBM DeveloperWorks. He authors the Negative Approach blog on CNet.com.

Rosenberg holds a BA from Rutgers University and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

Eugene Ciurana is the Director of Systems Infrastructure for LeapFrog Enterprises,

where he and his team designed and built a 100% SOA-based system that enables millions Internet-ready educational products and services. In 2006, he led the official adoption of Linux and other open-source technologies at Wal-Mart Stores Information Systems Division as chief liaison between Walmart.com Global and the ISD Technology Council.

Eugene has contributed to Java, Linux, and OS X open-source projects and has architected main line of business applications and real-time systems for the largest companies in the world, including Wal-Mart, Bank One/Chase, National Oilwell Varco, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Univex/Celanese, Nexis/Lexis, etc. He's the author of over 50 feature articles and editorials for major publications in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. He's currently writing books about the Google App Engine and about how to build scalable enterprise systems.

Hasan Rizvi Senior Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware Products

As senior vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware Products, Hasan Rizvi is responsible for the company's Service-Oriented Architecture, Application Server, Communications and Identity Management and Security product development, product management and architecture. Previously Mr. Rizvi was vice president of Oracle Enterprise Manager responsible for the company's Data Center Automation products.

Prior to returning to Oracle in 2001, Mr. Rizvi was vice president of Engineering for Corio, Inc. where he led the development of key technologies to enable efficient delivery of software as a service. Prior to that, Mr. Rizvi served as director of OLTP technologies for Oracle, where he was instrumental in development of transaction processing, messaging and queuing and high-end scalability technologies for Oracle Database products.

Mr. Rizvi has a M.S. in computer science from Rutgers University and an M.S. in engineering management from Stanford University. He also holds eight patents in the database management area.

As Vice President of Development in the Fusion Middleware group at Oracle, Adam Messinger is responsible for managing the Coherence, JRockit, WebLogic Operations Control, and web tier products. Prior to joining Oracle, Adam worked as a venture capitalist at Smartforest Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Previously, Adam was a founder of Gauntlet Systems, a software development tools company that was acquired by Borland. Prior to that, Adam was a member of the original WebLogic team and later served in a number of technical leadership roles at BEA. In the distant past, Adam ran the engineering practice at Organic Online and was a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. Adam is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was a Sloan Fellow and of Willamette University where he was a G. Herbert Smith Scholar.

Steve Harris Senior Vice President, Product Development, Server Technologies

After more than 10 years in scientific and engineering computing and consulting areas, he spent three years working on document management and systems integration. In 1993, he co-founded a software startup providing an object-oriented database product to Smalltalk developers (a precursor to Java). He sold the company to ParcPlace-Digitalk and served as VP of Engineering of that publicly-held company. He joined Oracle in 1997 to manage development of the Java virtual machine for the Oracle8i release.

Since then, his role has expanded to include the entire J2EE platform in the Oracle Application Server and Web Logic Server product. This includes EJB, Servlets, JSPs, JDBC drivers, SQLJ, TopLink, and web services support in both the application server and database.

Next week I'm speaking at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, to be held Sept. 16^th and 17^th in NYC. I'm doing a keynote talk on Tuesday morning entitled SOA in the Combat Zone: How to Succeed with SOA the First Time and Never Make a Mistake. With a title like that you can expect some useful real world perspective around SOA, including what works, what does not work, and how all this fits into the concept of the emerging Web. Looking forward to the presentation.

Also, I plan to be covering the event prolifically, both here on the blog and on Twitter. The Twitter feed will include all blog posts, my twits, and photos, so make sure to follow me.

There is so much coverage around Google Chrome by the mainstream technology press that I typically don't pay much attention to these kinds of "hype-y" things until there is a reason to pay attention. I did download Chrome, installing it on the test machine in my office to see what the fuss was about and how this would affect the world of SOA/WOA. Folks, there is something to pay attention to here.

I view the browser as really the next platform, something that will allow you to access a multitude of rich Internet applications, services, and have them work and play well together, no matter if you're on a traditional desktop, phone, PDA, or a screen in your car. Chrome seems to be a much larger leap in that direction, built from the ground up to deal with Internet-delivered applications and Web services, abstracting you away from the native operating system. At least it seems that way from my initial testing.

So, what does this have to do with SOA? Everything. SOA, at its essence, is the use of services as a way to deal with architecture. We expose services that we have been dealing with for years (legacy), we create new services, and we leverage services in the cloud that we neither own nor host. Then, we're able to create business solutions by mixing and matching services into processes and/or applications, simply put.

Thus, having a browser that is built for the use of services, Internet delivered or internal, using better operating and security mechanisms, could revolutionize the way we look at SOA. Services can be seen, thus understood, and "sex on the screen" SOA-driven applications will wow 'em in the board room.

I've always said that most SOA going on out there is through the mixing and matching of external Web-delivered services externalized through mashups, really as a way to prove the concept and to sell SOA internally. Now we have a better platform (browser) to do that.

In other words, the presence of Chrome will drive much SOA in the short term; it looks like a much better tool for the job.

Chrome will become a valuable piece of the architectural puzzle, perhaps a missing piece

There were more responses around my post yesterday than I expected. Most of the posts and articles reflecting my thoughts that Google Chrome seems to be a good step in the right direction for SOA. I'll let the reactions speak for themselves:

Joe McKendrick took did a great job of summing up the issues in his post yesterday.

"But to look at it from an enterprise perspective, Chrome may help lay the groundwork for a smoother path to service oriented architecture as well."

Also, a good summary from Richard Koman, "Chrome Will Enhance SOA in the Enterprise." Richard sited my blog post and other sources.

"Google Chrome may be the fastest browser around, but it may actually prove to be even more important to the enterprise for its ability to interact with service-oriented architectures (SOA)."

"Salesforce.com, a Google partner, is especially enthusiastic about the potential for Chrome to improve adoption of Web services. 'As we are increasingly dependent on Web apps, how business users use Web browsers changes,' said Adam Gross, VP of developer marketing at Salesforce."

But the best responses always come from comments left by the readers.

Steven Kahn, had the best comment, further stressing the technical reasons why Chrome is a good thing for SOA:

" The innovative aspects of the Chrome browser (multi-processing, execution model, memory mgmt, javascript processing, etc.) are all equally applicable to the OS as they are to the browser. The future of rich internet applications requires these underlying improvements to support the increased level of server-browser activities going back and forth. Particularly by doing away with javascript singlethreading, it opens the door for more and more services to be interacting with the browser simultaneously."

Which was my point, and covered already in many other blogs and articles. But good to say it again.

Just to be clear. Chrome is not a savior for SOA/WOA. Its value is that it considers the use of Web delivered applications, and Web-delivered services, within the architecture of the browser. It's not an afterthought. This is a huge shift in thinking, and something that is desperately needed as we drive toward the use of services for applications and composites where the browser plays a key role. In essence, Chrome will become a valuable piece of the architectural puzzle, perhaps a missing piece.

Fellow blogger Loraine Lawson does a great job in filling in the missing pieces of my previous posts on Chrome's value to SOA.

"By George, I think she's got it!" Actually I did not go into a good, direct discussion around the technical attributes of Chrome because so many other bloggers and authors where covering it, but I think I should have, based on the questions and comments I received. In the world of blogging, you hit on something with less than 300-400 words and move on to something else. This is actually a great topic for a feature article… hint, hint… wink, wink… nudge, nudge.

Of course not everyone agrees with me. Indeed Rob Eamon, in his comment on my and Joe's postings, pushed back on Chrome as related to SOA.

Well, if there is anyone who says "SOA is something you do, not something you buy" (or download), it's me. However, it does not mean that specific technology can't come along that provides a good systemic tool that will make service visualization and use easier. That's my point. It's not a savior for SOA, as I said in my last post. Just cool technology that makes some aspects of SOA within some specific problem domains easier to solve. Technology is never something that drives architecture; it's the other way around. So, I agree with Rob on that point.

Good discussion around this topic. I'll pick it up again as we understand more about Chrome.

Just completed my keynote presentation, "SOA in the Combat Zone," at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Summit. I thought it went well. You can find the slides here. I do have an audio recording, I'll post it somewhere.

True to form, Todd Biske took me to task for my last "SOA Governance Monday" post floating the notion of SOA governance in the cloud. He entitled his response "Governance in the Clouds? No thank you."

I hope I did not send Todd running down the hall to the datacenter to hug his server. :-) However, I suspect a lot of people in the enterprises out there have a similar take on this as Todd did, and I thought he brought up some good points, perhaps even agreeing with me on most points, as I read it.

OK, so far so good. However, I'm not sure anybody would disagree all that is on the way. Indeed I was just talking to John Musser, the founder of ProgrammableWeb, who is working on a registry/directory API that does something very close to that. Thus, you'll be able to access these services using a common directory API, which will include basic SOA governance capabilities. In essence, one-stop shopping for API information, standing between the consumer of the service, and the provider. Going forward, we will see thousands of service providers, all discoverable and governed through a set of well-established APIs/services. Basic governance at first, then more advanced as time goes on.

Once again, we agree. SOA governance should be a focus on the people, policies, and processes. I'm simply asserting that the SOA governance delivered as a service may be able to provide much more value versus on-premise, including access to common patterns and policies, the value of "as a service," and the ability to better leveraging the resources that are emerging outside of the enterprise. Thus, more effective application of the technology pattern in support of the people and the enterprise.

Again, we agree. There are a ton of enterprises out there who won't let any enterprise data escape their firewall. While this was the prevailing thinking just a few years ago, the acceptance of SaaS-delivered solutions such as Salesforce.com has made data living outside of the enterprise more accepted. Hopefully, SOA governance in the cloud will follow the same path, I think there is still something here.

I've been kicking this one around for 10 years. Perhaps it's time to stop kicking and start doing.

The idea of SOA governance is to provide command, control, discovery, and monitoring, as well as design and development support for services that make up your SOA. Most people get that, but in some cases don't want to get that. Perhaps there is a larger opportunity here for both the SOA vendors and the end users.

What's so limiting about SOA governance is the fact that you're given an empty registry/repository and then are asked to fill it up with information about services that you create or in most cases expose. From there it's a constant struggle to keep that repository up-to-date, and thus the SOA governed properly. Indeed, we've been here before with metadata repositories that don't seem to get the maintenance they needed. Perhaps we are doomed to make the same mistake here, unless we come up with something a bit more clever.

We've been dealing with the notion of a shared registry/repository for some time now, delivered as a service. Heck, I've been involved with a few companies that were working on the concept. Instead of leveraging a local repository that just tracks services within your enterprises, you link to a shared repository that already contains thousands of services from thousands of providers, with design and governance information, and it's just a matter of picking what you need and then filling in the gaps with your own services.

This repository would provide more than just WSDL, but a complete design time and runtime SOA governance system delivered out of the cloud, perhaps linked with a local slave repository within your firewall. The core notion would be to provide access and control for both public services, which you and others are able to leverage, and private services that only your enterprise can see. That would provide a complete SOA governance solution, design time and run-time, for all services.

Also, since this is a cloud thing, we'll need to provide "new value." The core value that I see, beyond the use of hosted services you don't develop or maintain, is the fact that there will be design patterns already defined for you around specific categories of services, or pre-built policies around the operation of those services. This is shared: As the services are revised so are the design artifacts and the policies, both shared and private. In short, you're taking advantage of the community aspect of SOA governance delivered as a service to do most of the work for you…100,000 heads are better than one.

Not new, as I said. I've been kicking this one around for 10 years. Perhaps it's time to stop kicking and start doing.

New podcast is out tonight.

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Starting SOA from the business on down

National City is pretty typical of older banks attempting to modernize their infrastructure, and they are leveraging SOA to make that happen

I thought the presentations were great yesterday at the SOA Executive Forum. Good case studies. The most impressive was "Designing Successful SOA by Starting with the Business" by Joe McCartin, senior vice president and chief information officer at the National City Corp. I thought that Joe brought an executive perspective to SOA, and had a good grounding in the issues.

National City is pretty typical of older banks that are attempting to modernize their infrastructure and are leveraging SOA to make that happen. Indeed, they put an aggressive plan in place morphing the IT infrastructure over time, leveraging SOA concepts and best practices. Joe was very open about the people issues he had to address, as well as the continued challenge of governance.

One of the things that made me a bit wary, however, was the fact that they name certain technologies as "strategic technology assets" and push those technologies from project to project. I understand the issues there: they already had made the investment and they have people trained to leverage that technology solution, thus it's just more cost effective to leverage it.

While it seemed to work for National City, I suspect there are time when that strategic technology asset is not a good fit. Also, there are times when the architectural control board is incorrect. The policy was created by this "architectural control board," which would be another point of concern for me. However, you can't argue with success. It seems to be working for them based on Joe's presentation.

Central to the success was their ability to address the people and politics around the technology infrastructure, and put some productive governance processes in place. The technology is easy…it always is.