Opinion: Enterprise initiatives and vendor interop efforts continue to tell a strong story.Ill be in Napa this week to brief attendees at the Ziff Davis CIO Summit on
the subject of service-oriented architecture as a strategy for
"future-proof" IT. As often happens, the title for the talk was on the agenda before my
name got attached to it: As readers of this letter know, I side with
Tom Peters on the issue of treating
the future and its chaotic leading edge as an opportunity to be
exploited, not an obstacle to be overcome, so I might have chosen
"future-ready" rather than "future-proof" as the IT strategy
attribute to pursue.
Be that as it may, events have graciously conspired to give me
plenty of new material that may come as news to even the seasoned CIO
attendees at that event. Its not news that SOA offers outstanding
benefits, but I hope to provide some useful insights on how not to pursue it.
Its important, for example, to recognize when a "service bus" is
growing vertically up and down each of several application stacks, rather
than being grown horizontally across the enterprise. This point was
made by Frank
Martinez, executive VP at SOA Software, when we spoke last month;
it deserves to be refreshed in light of Microsofts
announcement late last week of the rebranding of its developer
technology portfolio. Addressing demand-side concerns about preserving
horizontal SOA flexibility are the members of
SOA Link, a
vendor interoperability group that I confess had escaped my notice
until Mindreef
sent me a note this morning about their new membership in that organization.
Even if totally successful in achieving a 100 percent vendor-neutral SOA
environment, organizations will still find (as Ill emphasize in Napa)
that there are certainly offsetting costs to SOAs benefits. Much as
the move to object-oriented languages made it harder to achieve memory
locality for simple instruction retrieval, so does the move to SOA
enlarge the working sets of data and code in large-scale enterprise
systems. One example of that challenge can be found at Starwood Hotels
and Resorts, whose 950 properties do business under various well-known
brands such as Westin and Sheraton: The company is using in-memory data
management tools for clustered Java applications from Tangosol, whose
flagship product goes by the name of Coherence,
to maintain system performance as
Starwood merges its many legacy systems for online booking into a
unified service-based grid.
Ultimately, what matters are not so much the technical measures such
as data throughput optimization, but the customer satisfaction measures
such as fraction of successful transaction completion. Measuring that
end-to-end
performance of applications in the wild is the stock in
trade of TeaLeaf Technology, winner
of this years eWEEK
Excellence Award in the signal category of E-Business Foundations:
a choice that not only highlights the product, but also shines our
spotlight on that particular area of infrastructure management as
deserving of management attention in the coming year. Youll find more
about this years Excellence winners and finalists in a special report
on June 19.
Another cost of the move to SOA is the potential bloat of network
traffic under the burden of verbose XML data streams, a problem being
attacked by Reactivity with
its technology for slashing the burden of XML-related processing on
general-purpose servers—increasing the fraction of server capacity
thats actually available for running business logic, rather than
executing XML and other plumbing code, from on the order of 10 percent
to something much closer to 95 percent or more. One of the key
distinctions between SOA as a mere modularity scheme and SOA as a
genuine open-air market of services is the ease of auto-discovery of
available resources as they enter and leave the scope of a service
requester: Reactivity announced today some major improvements to its auto-discovery technology.
Tell me what youve discovered lately at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.
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