Selling SOA Goes Beyond Software

Major players discuss implementation strategies more than products

By Geoff Koch

November 15, 2006 —

The days are long gone when service-oriented architecture, or SOA, was a topic discussed strictly among geeks.

Recently IBM posted three short animated spots on YouTube describing services as Lego-like building blocks, musical notes and mix-and-match clothing. But the YouTube community wasn’t necessarily smitten by the corporate market-speak.

“I know one thing for sure—[SOA is] tougher than building a house with Legos,” commented one user with a handle of “thewwump.”

If anything is for sure, it’s that momentum may be building for SOA to move permanently beyond IT into the broader business landscape and lexicon. Yet despite the prodigious output of marketing departments, it’s still difficult to discern who has the winning SOA strategies at established vendors such as BEA Systems, IBM, Iona Technologies and Microsoft.

“This is like the early stage of the Tour de France, with lots of vendors bunched up at the beginning of the race,” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink, a consulting firm focusing on SOA. “SOA is in the same category as total quality management, or TQM, Six Sigma and ISO 9000—all of which took several years to gain widespread acceptance in the business community.”

On Oct. 3, IBM made a wide-ranging announcement of four new and 23 enhanced software products, including a new release of WebSphere Business Modeler and new software called WebSphere Registry and Repository related to SOA governance.

However, Sandy Carter, IBM vice president of WebSphere and SOA, certainly seems content with the SOA-isn’t-really-about-software message.

“Yes, we can talk about the WebSphere ESB [enterprise service bus],” said Carter, “but I think the most significant recent announcement has not been about a product or an offering, but rather the whole overarching theme that our customers are really seeing value from SOA.”

IBM, which is also screening an SOA-inspired film in select movie theaters nationwide, is not alone in ginning up SOA marketing messages to sometimes silly levels.

On Oct. 10, at the Czech Republic stop of BEAWorld—BEA modestly describes its conference as “the premier event for SOA thought leadership”—the company announced the releases of WebLogic Platform 9.2 and AquaLogic Business Process Management 5.7. The products are supposed to shore up the foundation of the BEA SOA 360 platform, which was announced Sept. 19 and was billed as the industry’s first native SOA platform.

Schmelzer has heard promises about the 360 platform—naturally extensible for third-party development, naturally blendable, perfect for customization to address highly specific customer demands—and has one knee-jerk reaction.

“This really is a professional services play for BEA, an area in which the company has been somewhat weak,” he said.

Indeed, BEA’s Web site highlights its SOA for Executives set of consulting and education services. Composed of workshops and classroom sessions, the services promise to help executives sell their organizations on the business benefits of SOA—presumably by the end of 2008, when all of BEA’s products are supposed to be leveraging the so-called microService Architecture that underpins the 360 platform.

“No, we don’t want to back up our Humvee full of consultants and unload them at a customer’s door,” said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA Workshop, who added that BEA was perfectly content to stay focused on software, where margins are typically much higher than in professional services.

Though coy on his consulting strategy, Roth sounds remarkably similar to IBM’s Carter when talking about just what comes up in BEA’s SOA consulting engagements.

“Only a third of what we talk about has to do with software,” he said. “The more common questions are: ‘How do I do change management in my organization?’ and ‘How do I define costs and benefits of this SOA project and make sure that I’m aligned with core business needs?’”

NOT EVERYONE IS VOCAL
In contrast to IBM and BEA, which compete perhaps more vigorously over their SOA-related claims than the technology itself, Microsoft has been conspicuously silent on the subject of SOA, at least until recently. At the company’s SOA & Business Process Conference in early October, the clear message was that Microsoft was supporting an incremental, start-small approach to SOA.

“This departs from the industry norm of applying a high-risk, heavy, ‘top-down’ strategy to SOA implementations,” said Burley Kawasaki, group product manager for BizTalk Server at Microsoft.

Also notably missing from the SOA center stage, as Schmelzer sees it, is Iona. It’s a conspicuous absence since the company’s history is grounded in Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or CORBA, which aids in mainframe integration issues and is arguably the precursor to SOA. Joe McKendrick, a consultant and SOA blogger for ZDNet, said that the Dublin, Ireland-based company needs to evolve beyond its heritage of mainframes, which are fast giving way to a world of data centers built on cheap clusters of commodity x86 servers.

Iona CTO Eric Newcomer cited progress in his company’s Artix microkernel core for SOA, including the Artix Orchestration plug-in, which can be used together with the Artix runtime to work across .NET, Java EE and other platforms.

To those who might write off his company’s future, Newcomer pointed out that Iona has achieved five straight quarters of revenue growth, “with sales of Artix in particular up more than 100 percent compared to last year.” Those who want to write off SOA as an endlessly boring consideration of just what makes for a good ESB—dedicated message bus or network itself for transport?—might occasionally take note, just for humor’s sake, of what the SOA marketers are doing these days. IBM’s YouTube experiment hit a small speed bump when someone managed to insert lots of porn-graffiti into one of the animated clips.

The clip, cleaned up now though still featuring the same attractive model, is available again on YouTube. After being served up several thousand times, what kind of eager business- and tech-savvy responses has it evoked?

None, actually, though there is this, from YouTube user “essive”: “I didn’t know SOA came with cute women and wardrobes.”

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/29794

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.

Software AG blends both CentraSite editions into one SOA management product ActiveSOA fulfills the company's promise to simplify its SOA management product line and to fully integrate the software from its acquisition of webMethods. The ability to customize SOA life cycles was added to the overall product.

SOA guys do not embrace developers Since SOA evolved from software development, it makes no sense that SOA people do not like to listen to developers. That attitude should change, lest SOA people miss out on good ideas that can come from developers.

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