Where is the S in SOA?
CA Council
May 15, 2007 - Prague
Kris Tuttle

Experience Bias
Micro-computing (Pre-80’s and IBM)
Artificial Intelligence (Carnegie-Mellon and IBM)
Software (Carnegie-Mellon and IBM)
Equity Sales and Finance (S.G. Warburg)
Business (IBM, NYU)
Software Stocks (SoundView)
Research (Research 2.0)
Private Investor/Advisor (Cape Clear, Good Data, alfabet AG, Azure Ventures)

Technology Innovation Buzz
• Open source software (LAMP, RoR)
• Web 2.0 design patterns (AJAX, etc.)
• Social computing
• Advertising Business Model
• User-generated content/crowd sourcing
• Eternal Beta
• SOA, Mash-ups
• SaaS, On-Demand

Technology Innovation News
• OSS: Red Hat valuation, IBM investments
• Web 2.0: O’Reilly, Google (Maps)
• Social computing: del.icio.us, MySpace
• Advertising Business Model: Google, Death of Paper
• UGC: YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket
• Eternal Beta: Google, now everyone
• SOA, Mash-ups: “Enterprise 2.0,” Yahoo Pipes
• SaaS, On-Demand: Google, Salesforce.com

Technology Innovation Realty
• Open source software - Free to play for business..
• Web 2.0 design patterns - Windows alternative?
• Social computing - Consumer oriented.
• Advertising - Free to play for consumer.
• User-generated content/crowd sourcing - Output?
• Eternal Beta - Impractical for business.
• SOA, Mash-ups - Trivial or brittle.
• SaaS, On-Demand - Trivial or brittle?

Things to embrace.
• Transparency from OSS and Web 2.0.
• Free licensing and community editions from OSS.
• Collaboration from social computing.
• Web Services from SOA and mash ups.
• Open APIs from Web 2.0 and SOA.

Golden Software Architecture
• Bind and be bound - discoverable, arbitrary
• Call or be called - no hierarchy
• Transparency - clear functions and methods
• Context aware - maximum advantage
• Sub-second response time - adoption

SaaS: Expanding the market.
• We rented everything in the past.
• Networks mean that now stuff can be anywhere.
• Hosted, pay as you grow approach is very desirable for
new customers and applications.
• Some industries and applications fit perfectly.
• Combing with OSS is kind of exciting.
• However:
– Combining services to create useful new composite applications
as in mash ups a non-starter. (True even for consumer
applications.)
– Custom software implementations still yield business results
and competitive advantage.

Virtualization: How big?
• VMware expected 2007 revenues of $1B.
• Past usage for development and testing.
• Evolution to consolidation and dynamic hosting
supported by cost savings.
• Can it shift the locus of enterprise computing?
• EMC clearly a financial winner looking to
achieve a 10x on their $665M investment.

Business - IT Linkage

“Never try to teach a pig to
sing; it wastes your time and
annoys the pig.”
- Robert Heinlein

“Technology doesn’t drive
business innovation. Business
drives business innovation.”
- Business Guy

The Dreams of the Few
• SAA + AD/Cycle
• “Expert Systems”
• Two-tier, then three-tier computing
• UML
• CORBA
• EAI
• SOA, On-Demand
• CMDB, ITIL
• Semantic Web

What we need.
Business (Strategy, Value, Funding, ROI)
The
Logical
View
Business Services
?
The
Physical
View
IT (Planning, Costing, Building, Running)

Trial and Error
• CMDB/ITIL: Works below the line for IT.
• EA + BPM: Too IT-driven.
• Education: See pig quote.
• IT Governance: Somehow morphed into
security and compliance.
• Outsourcing: Whack a mole.
• Amazingly everything else: Vista,
virtualization, VoIP, data center consolidation, etc.
• Data: Promising tactical approach.
• And what *is* the semantic web anyway?

How do we get there?
A business and technology problem. (Myriad application
areas,thousands of interfaces.)
Not just a technology solution. (SOA Stack, EA + BPM)
Missing pieces:
– Common language/underlying meta-models
– Vision and thousands of baby steps
– On-going Collaboration
– Business content, demand to budget (ROI)

Microsoft
• .NET remains a strong and flexible platform on
which to build.
• Vista and IE reset the bar on delivering
applications with rich UI capabilities.
• Slow adoption of Vista likely to drive MSFT to
upgrade XP and IE to allow rich UI functions.
• Is Microsoft in “Motion” or not?
– Interesting effort. Signs it’s not going anywhere.
Lacks collaboration. Credibility is a problem.

IBM
• IBM GS and Irving Wladawsky-Berger seem to get
business services and components.
• The pictures are pretty but there are no actual services
behind the blocks.
• Furthermore there appears to be no time dimension in
terms of actual versus planned future states.
• IBM SW is waiting to hear it from customers.

SAP
• Strong credibility in business process
automation.
• Netweaver is reasonably successful.
• Growing interest in enterprise modeling.
• Distracted by SMB market opportunity.

Oracle
• Acquisition integration dominates operations.
• Fusion designed to be overall integration platform.
• Schizophrenic attitude towards SaaS and SOA.
• Strategy more focused on keeping everyone in the fold
and offering a better alternative to SAP.
• Probably will not be a player in the planning, stepwise
journey to logical business/IT management.

The Rest
• BEA - Focused on implementation solutions.
• Software AG - Obviously interested in being a bigger
player with WebMethods. Next acquisition said to be in
the EAM space.
• BMC - Wants to be delivering to the CXO but only has
marketing.
• HP/Mercury - Software dying, strategy lost at sea.

Conclusions
• The software industry is in a transitional phase.
– Low/no growth for mature segment.
– Plenty of experimentation with Web, SaaS and OSS.
– Enterprises waiting for business/IT integration.
• Solution lives in generic services layer.
– Not SaaS or SOA as we’ve defined them.
– Not other IT-driven solutions like EA, BPM, EBM, etc.
• Benefits of integration stem from:
– Vision + Planning
– On-going Collaboration
– Process + software approach
• Most likely players at this point seem to be IBM,
Microsoft and SAP.

Questions
Kris Tuttle
kris@research2zero.com