The Future of SOA --
Myths and Realities
Ross
Altman, CTO, Business
Integration, Sun
Microsystems kicked off
the SOA Consortium’s
December meeting in
Santa Clara by leading
an interactive
discussion with
attendees on SOA myths,
misunderstandings and
realities.
In
lieu of a traditional
presentation, Altman
promoted conversation by
stating a myth, sharing
his point-of-view and
then inviting meeting
attendees to support,
augment or refute the
myth and/or his
arguments. Key concepts
in the SOA myths
discussed included
business IT alignment,
business integration,
modular development in
standalone applications,
and governance
investment in systemic
and opportunistic
applications.
In
respect to SOA &
business-IT alignment,
attendees spoke to
developing successful,
responsibility based,
relationships between
business and IT, as well
as the importance of
business contracts in
ecosystems dependent
upon the cooperation of
multiple parties.
Altman’s depiction of
service-oriented versus
casual development as
mapped to systematic
versus opportunistic
applications garnered
the most conversation.
The root of the
discussion focused on
the degree of management
investment required for
services underlying ‘run
the business’ versus
‘mash-up’ applications.
This conversation
unearthed interesting
examples of business and
mission capabilities
dependent on stable and
accurate data, but
delivered via mash-ups.
In
closing, Altman offered
a final thought all
heartily agreed upon,
“We are not paid to
write code, we are paid
to deliver systems”.
Presentation
Abstract
Clearly, over the
next five years, more
vendors will put more
"SOA" into
more applications and
tooling. And, just as
clearly, more
enterprise developers
will use SOA to inform
the architecture,
development process
and governance model
that they implement
for their future
projects. But, what
does that really mean?
How
many services provided
by the COTS
application vendors
will be reusable? How
many of these vendors
will endorse and
implement standards
that make their
services
"pluggable"?
How many development
projects in end-user
enterprises will
develop services that
can be leveraged by
multiple projects
within that
enterprise?
This
session will discuss
these and other
questions that get at
a key dilemma facing
IT over the next five
years: Is SOA really
going to rule the
future of IT? Or, will
SOA be dismissed as
"just another
good idea that was
over-hyped and
misunderstood"?
About the Speaker:
Ross Altman is CTO
for SOA and Business
Integration at Sun
Microsystems, Inc. He
focuses on the
direction, development
and communication of
Sun's business
integration technology
vision and strategy.
Mr.
Altman came to Sun
through Sun's
acquisition of SeeBeyond,
the application
integration and SOA
development tools
vendor. Prior to joining
SeeBeyond, Mr. Altman
was director of
integrated technologies
at EDS. Prior to that,
Mr. Altman was a vice
president and research
director with Gartner,
where his research
focused on the use of
integration middleware
to support composite
applications,
straight-through
processing and business
process management.
Mr.
Altman holds bachelor's
and master's degrees
from Rutgers University.
In addition, he has
authored more than 150
articles on application
development and
integration and has
delivered more than 100
presentations on these
subjects at industry
conferences and
seminars.
Register to download the
podcast and slide presentation:
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