Industry Watch: The added dimension to SOA

By David Rubinstein

May 14, 2012 — (Page 1 of 2)
First there was “Jaws 3D.” Then came “The Lion King,” “Avatar” and “Titanic”... all in 3D. Will “SOA in 3D” be as much of smash as its predecessors?

In its original incarnation, SOA (service-oriented architecture) was mostly about transport protocols. How can you connect Point A to Point B and exchange information? Today, it’s about security and service-level agreements, privacy and policy—and multiple processes working simultaneously.

The notion of SOA in 3D came out of a discussion I had with Hub Vandervoort, CTO of SOA infrastructure products at Progress Software, for an article on SOA I wrote for the May issue of this magazine. Vandervoort described it as SOA in a federated world.

“If you think of process, like a BPM diagram, it’s a 2D canvas that shows you one process at a time, like a Visio diagram,” he said. “But in fact, if my business is made up of many of these, and I stack them up like a card deck, I need like a V axis to drill through that card deck and see the cross-process to understand how they’re interacting with one another.”

So SOA in 3D is about gaining visibility into processes as they are executed, in real time. But Vandervoort takes it a step further, to point out that real-time business intelligence is not in fact real time unless you’re in a position to act on that data. Business intelligence, he noted, traditionally surfaces information in a timeline that isn’t actionable: you get a report at the end of the day, or month. That allows you to change your process for the future, but leaves you unable to act on something, like a short-term sales opportunity. He gave the following example:

“If I got a report 5 picoseconds after a patient has died that he was having an irregular drug interaction, the report is lightning fast but the guy’s still dead, right? I need the information in a timeframe that I can actually do something about it. But that’s visibility. If I can’t actually do something about it, even if it’s actionable information, if I’m not in a place where I can stop it, it’s really not real time yet.

Related Search Term(s): SOA

Pages 1 2

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/36589

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

SOA Software releases project-planning suite for SOA transition Portfolio Manager provides a framework for SOA planning, helping developers prioritize services, understand dependencies, and plan architecture and governance processes, the company says. The product is marketed as being essential for creating road maps for transitioning to SOA.

SOA (the term) is dead, but SOA (the architecture) lives on Cloud and APIs have their roots in service architectures defined more than a decade ago

SOA’s dead; long live SOA While software tool providers can no longer pin their products to the term, its best practices live on inside the cloud

SOA Software releases project-planning suite for SOA transition
Portfolio Manager provides a framework for SOA planning, helping developers prioritize services, understand dependencies, and plan architecture and governance processes, the company says. The product is marketed as being essential for creating road maps for transitioning to SOA Read More...