Tag Archives: Service Oriented Architecture
Does your Data Virtualization Solution Adapt To (Big) Data Problems
Late last year at a company all-hands meeting, the CEO of a large consumer electronics company had a serious mandate. He needed big results and fast.
“Competition is really heating up and customer churn is on the rise. I need visibility on-demand – a common view of all enterprise data or else we cannot continue to grow.” IT teams across the enterprise have been scurrying and working furiously to create a common view of CUSTOMER, PRODUCT, SALES, and INVENTORY, but the results have been incomplete, inaccurate and too slow. This is no easy task. (more…)
To Successfully Service-Orient, Data-Orient First!
I have firmly believed that a day would come when it would be you, my fellow integrators, telling me that one needs to data-orient first before benefiting from service-orientation. That day has indeed come!
Just recently, I created a quick one question survey and sent it off to a number of application and enterprise architects as well as IT managers at leading enterprises. The question was:
- What are the top three things on your mind as you architect or re-architect your infrastructures?
There was a common thread across the responses that I received:
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Service-orientation or an architectural approach to increase the speed and agility of how IT responds to a business’ requests,
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Doing more with less or something to that effect, and
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An easy way to leverage all relevant information, when it is needed and how it is needed
When I saw these responses, the pragmatic part of me started to build a list of questions in my head and I decided to call a number of these professionals and get the real scoop on their selections.
Here is what I heard…
‘Half-Baked Ideas’ About Mega-Changes Ahead in the Next Decade (Part 2)
The following are the remaining five “HBIs” (half-baked ideas) I am formulating to explore how SOA, cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0 and virtualization are shaping our information and business environments in the coming decade – the 2010s. These are based on a keynote speech I presented at the recent Cloud QCamp online event. (For HBIs 1-5, click here.)
HBI #6: Made to order — application vendors will become assemblers of made-to-order, pre-built software components. (more…)
‘Half-Baked Ideas’ for Mega-Changes Ahead in the Next Decade
I just delivered the keynote address for ebizQ’s latest Cloud QCamp, exploring the growing convergence of SOA with cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0 and virtualization, and I thought I would share some salient highlights here at the Perspectives site.
There are several key forces converging that are reshaping the way we will do business in the 2010s (you know, that next decade that is almost upon us). (more…)
How About a ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ for Data?
The principles of service oriented architecture (SOA) show a lot of promise for building greater agility and integration into applications. So why not extend these capabilities to the data integration world as well? With initiatives such as data warehousing and master data management (MDM) coming to the fore, data integration needs to be addressed on an enterprise scale.
Madan Sheina, principal analyst within Ovum’s Software Applications group, proposes that a data architecture be designed along the same lines as SOA for applications – in what he calls process-driven data integration. (more…)
Service-Orientation is the New Mantra!
If you have been following the blog circles lately, there is a big buzz about SOA being dead. It all started with a recent blog post by Anne Thomas Manes in which she says “although the word ‘SOA’ is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever.”
SOA at its very core is simply an architectural approach and not a technology stack nor a vendor-recommended product or platform. As Anne says, “they missed the important stuff: architecture and services.”
As I have always maintained, an SOA implementation can be as simple as a few business services that wrap business or application logic, and in its most complex form it can be an entire ecosystem of technologies selected based on thoroughly analyzing needs and that most importantly support service-orientation principles. (more…)
Webinar: Why Data Integration is Critical to SOA and BPM Success
In recent years, there has been plenty of attention on the dual approaches of service oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) to help businesses realize greater agility. However, the data equation often gets lost amidst all the buzz and excitement over SOA and BPM. Process-driven data integration and the delivery of data services as part of SOA are critical to the success of these efforts.
On Tuesday, December 9th, Ash Parikh, Informatica’s resident real-time data integration and SOA expert — and a blogger here at the Perspectives community — will be joining Madan Sheina, principal analyst within Ovum’s Software Applications group, in a Webinar to discuss the urgency of data integration within emerging SOA and BPM environments. Beth Gold-Bernstein, my colleague at ebizQ, will moderate.
Click here to register for and access the Webinar, “Guaranteeing Agility in SOA and BPM with Process-Driven Data Integration.” (December 9, 12:00 Noon Eastern)
As Ash and Madan will explain, most SOA and BPM efforts have centered on dealing with the integration of application silos and automating business processes at the application layer. With data being the backbone of these applications and business processes, many enterprise architects end up struggling with a number of data-centric issues and equipped with the wrong tools for the job. For example, there are issues caused by the inability to access diverse and fragmented data, by integrating enterprise data only to find out after-the-fact that the data is inaccurate and inconsistent, and by dealing with enterprise information that is typically delivered at various latencies.
Ash and Madan will also discuss how to leverage process-driven data integration, and make information-as-a-service a reality. These are approaches that can guarantee agility by enabling SOA and BPM with the seamless delivery of accurate, consistent and timely information.
“Guaranteeing Agility in SOA and BPM with Process-Driven Data Integration“ (December 9, 12:00 Noon Eastern)
Where’s the Beef? Why SOA Needs MDM
Years, ago, I came across this question in an article in Boardroom Reports: “What do you call a hamburger that’s 99% meat and 1% garbage?”
The answer was a “garbageburger.” In other words, even if a small fraction of the burger is tainted, the whole meal is tainted. The original analogy was being used to illustrate the challenges of time management, but it’s an apt analogy for data environments as well. That is, if a portion of the information is bad or unreliable, trust in all the data eventually breaks down. In essence, many implementations of service-oriented architecture (SOA) taking place across companies may be garbageburgers because they are serving up unreliable information – an element that has been out of the control of SOA designers.
Sorry if I ruined anyone’s lunch, but the point had to be made. (more…)
How SOA Enhances Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
“Despite certain rumors to the contrary, data warehousing is thriving.”
I couldn’t agree more with Judy Ko in her recent post, in which she points out that predictions that data warehousing was going to be abstracted away — by service-oriented architecture (SOA) and other new approaches — didn’t quite pan out. Instead, if anything, the need for data warehousing solutions only continues to grow. Data volumes are growing, and businesses are demanding ever-more sophisticated business intelligence and analytics to run against that data.
If anything, approaches such as SOA promise to greatly enhance – not replace – data warehousing, (more…)
Data and Processes are Intertwined!
In one of my earlier posts I discussed the need for a sophisticated data services-driven technology serving as the foundation for SOA and BPM.
When I was poking around the web recently, I ran into a powerful statement by Michael Blechar from Gartner, covered in the DAMA keynote, titled Survival of the Data Management Fittest:
“Data and processes are intertwined. It will fundamentally change the way organizations think about your roles, and your roles are going to need to evolve”.
At this year’s Data Management Association (DAMA) International Symposium,
Michael is quoted saying that:
“In this world there’s a very loosely coupled user interface from the assembled services that in turn share access to data. SOA exposes data issues to more people, places and processes, and what I tell companies is that without a focus on information management and meta data management they’re going to fail.”
It is in speaking to numerous customers, prospects and technologists that I had gathered that without accurate, consistent and timely information, SOA and BPM deployments will face serious information-centric hurdles, affecting the cost-effectiveness and success of the project. As we move towards more agile architectures, I believe that we need to grow typical process-centric approaches to include information centricity as well.
As Michael states:
“Where we are going is beyond the first generation of BPM and SOA [that is process-centric],” he said, “to the next generation of SOA that is information-centric.”
Observe that the key word here is “information-centric.” Reading such statements from Michael and many others definitely validates the strategy I have been defining for building out an effective IT infrastructure that can benefit from the flexibility of a services and process-driven approach, in the data integration layer. Simply wrapping data access with a web service does not qualify as a sophisticated data service and hence, stringing together such simple services with a BPM tool also does not guarantee agility.
As discussed in Services to Orient your Enterprise Data Layer, Joe McKendrick is of the opinion that neither SOA nor enterprise-application integration alone can effectively handle the enterprise data layer. However, data services delivered within an SOA framework can create a data-abstraction layer to address the complexities seen across enterprise data environments.
I have always said that without serving up good quality, consistent and timely information as a data service or a comprehensive data service built using a sophisticated data integration platform, SOA and BPM deployments will not be able to deliver on their promise of agility.
What are your experiences? What kind of information-centric issues have you run into in your service-oriented deployments? Is inaccurate, stale and inconsistent information passing through your IT infrastructure holding you back?