What more could I say?

An excerpt from the BEA Enterprise 360, A Business perspective

SOA: only the beginning
In an attempt to gain vital business agility, many organizations are turning to Service-Oriented Architecture.

In an SOA, complex business applications are componentized into discrete business services. These services run on an internal or external network, where they can be easily shared and reused across different silos and easily combined to create a new breed of business processes and composite applications. The potential for far greater business agility and alignment is enormous, as is the potential for savings and return on investment.

The initial success enjoyed by some early SOA adopters demonstrates the very real potential.That potential, however, cannot be realized by simply building and deploying reusable services. A successful SOA, one capable of quickly achieving and sustaining alignment, agility, and savings, requires an SOA foundation that promotes and supports air-tight collaboration between business and IT. That foundation must combine SOA with Business Process Management (BPM) and the collaborative capabilities of Web 2.0. The powerful chemistry of that combination can transcend business agility to deliver true business velocity.

SOA - Implementation

SOA is a concept which preaches reusability, loosely coupling the software services with proper protocol for data exchange. Becaues most of the time SOA is implemented using web services, it's always interpreted as SOA = Web services and vice versa. This is not true.

SOA is just a concept. This concept can be implemented using Web Services or age old RMI or something new that might come up in future. Currently, web services provide proper protocol/rules to communicate with a diverse set of systems, which makes it most desired for SOA implementation.

JSR 227 is coming up with a service oriented interface (SOI) for data binding and data access functionalities. According to JSR 227, whatever the underlying systems(EJB, DB or mainframes), the interfaces and the data will remain same.

Looking forward for it? Yes, me too.

ATG eCommerce Suite named #1

Little old, but a good thing to know. Forrester researchers ranked ATG eCommerce site as #1 against the competitors like IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft!

Thats news. Now, we need to wait and watch, how the ATG Marketing gears up after this pleasant surprise.

SaaS and Web 2.0 and SOA

SaaS is not an overnight concept like any other concept/architecture pattern you see in IT. All these old concepts, change like "old wine in new bottle". With the Web2.0 taking everything into it's sphere, SaaS is one that's going to benefit from it.

With Web 2.0, the users can directly use the portals/applications that are integrated or provisioned using SOA and with Web 2.0 functionalities.

SOA versus OO

Object Oriented programming believes that the data and behavior be coupled. It does profess a kind of, tight coupling though it has loose coupling features like inheritence.

The coupling in OO is with respect to a specific functionality, which most often requires tight coupling.

SOA, on the other hand is a concept to get the best service(s) working for a cause. The SOA, puts the protocol for integration and data exchange to make service usage easier. It allows the individual software services to be tight coupled or loose coupled. SOA would, rather decide the integration platform with a loosely coupled protocol and a proper data exchange model(currently achieved through web services). Read the SOA definition in my previous post here.

SOA basics and Event Manager

Nothing new, SOA, the loosely coupled architecture is the talk of the town. How I relate to SOA is that it's like an Event Manager.

What does an event manager do? He/She coordinates with all the vendors (service providers) to use(consume) the services for a great/happening show. The event manager needs to ensure that the vendors are providing the best quality of service and proper information for exchange.

SOA lets the experts handle their piece(service) with finessee and just gives a protocol, at the end, for integration and data exchange. SOA would not bother how the implementation of a service is done by the vendor. It just is worried about the quality of the service provided for the money paid.

SOA and SAAS together can take the market into a different world altogether.

Now Information as Service!

More than product development/Research and Development, we are interested in Services. Services is the buzz word today and will keep continuing for some more time at least. Latest is Information as Service!

It's a good idea to do this, as most of the companies have too much information to be processed. Why not this data, hardly used, put into action? It can be put to use using SOA to create a data service. Brad Wright of BEA Aqua Logic Data Services Platform, talks about it here!

SaaS - Moving up

Software as a Service is picking up fast. It's good that people will have to spend less on the licenses of the expensive software. Google Spreadsheet, Google Word etc will help a lot in improving the SaS market. Imagine with few licenses of Spreadsheet and Word, millions of people can save the cost for using these products!

It's impressive for the layman to use the software and pay it only when used. Many new ideas of business on SaaS are being floated by the emerging companies. That's a good development.