SOA Support Systems
I just kicked off the first, of many to come, SIIA CTO Roundtable in San Francisco, CA, yesterday. The purpose of the group is to provide a forum for technologist in leadership positions who want to exchange technology related ideas. In attendance for the founding event was Oracle, EMC/RSA, Kana, and Symphony Services.
This first series focused on SOA: Stories from the Frontline. The goal was to share concerns being seen in real world enterprise SOA development activities, not the kind of rosy stories you hear from vendors and trade magazines. Here are just a few items from my notes:
- Companies are still struggling with best SOA practices, even though standards exist. It is relatively easy to build simple SOA-based applications, but the model breaks down when you try to create an extended value-chain SOA; that is, one spanning multiple organizations.
- SOA model, build, deploy, monitor, and maintain development ecosystems are weak. Tools abound, but outside IBM WebSphere and Oracle BPM, there are few comprehensive IDE type resources that span the entire development lifecycle.
- Business leaders still don’t see the need for SOA as a named technology, but value the benefits that SOA can derive (see my blog on “Don’t Sell SOA”). Yes, they want agile applications capable of supporting new business requirements, but they still think SOA is just a market-hyped three letter acronym.
- There are enablement challenges facing real world SOA implementation: skill/knowledge, SOA SLA, simulation, logging, etc. The biggest challenge that every agreed on was the lack of engineering and architectural skills needed to build effective SOA systems. More on this in a later blog.
Yes, most of us probably know these to be true already, but having a SOA support system allows you to realize you’re not alone and leverage the strengths of others. As a group, we have identified several next steps that collectively we will work on. Again, more on those items later.
The next event will be in the Boston, MA, area sometime early 2008. I will blog the date, time, and location was soon as it’s available. Hope to see you there.
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