BEA goes for a SOA triple play |
 |
By Rich Seeley, News Writer
26 May 2006 | SearchWebServices.com |
|
|
San Francisco - It seemed every vendor at JavaOne this past week had its own definition of SOA, but Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit, offered a three-parter.
|
|
|
|
|
Service oriented architecture is about the way you structure your organization and the way you should structure your technology.
Bill Roth
Vice President, BEA Workshop Business Unit
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Analysts may say that SOA is not about products, but inasmuch as BEA Systems Inc. sells products, it was perhaps not surprising to hear that products come first in Roth's definition.
"SOA is a set of products," he said but perhaps sensing that analysts might descend on him like the hounds of hell, he added that tools and platforms are not the whole story.
"For us, service oriented architecture is three things," he said. "It is products but it's also people and it's also practice."
The BEA WebLogic platform and development tools along with Tuxedo middleware and AquaLogic Data Services Platform are products that allow architects and developers to "weave services together into composite applications and service networks," Roth said.
His own baby, WebLogic Workshop, will have a new release this summer that will offer developers a "graphical way of creating application that use Web services," he said.
Acknowledging that tools are only as effective as the people that use them, he said, people are crucial in his SOA triptych. BEA offers training services for helping the people at customer sites "deal with the realities of service-oriented architecture."
This also relates to the third part of his definition, which is about the practice of SOA, specifically best practices for the setting of policies and governance for how Web services interact. Here BEA offers consulting services.
"SOA is also a set of governance skills, best practices and policy," Roth said. "We have a team that does nothing but act as trusted advisors to CIOs and chief architects, to help them understand the key governance issues."
In this advisory capacity, he said, BEA itself is being changed by SOA because it's consultants have moved from working with developers to working with C-level executives, a move that he characterized as "very successful" for the company's bottom line.
"Where previously we talked really well to the developers, which we still do, now we can go into the CIO and say, 'Service oriented architecture is about the way you structure your organization and the way you should structure your technology.' We try to be a trusted advisor. We try to be the team that says, 'Let's find out what's right for you and we'll help you with that.'"
Here the people and the practice may intersect with Roth's unashamed interest in selling BEA products.
"If you need an application server," he said, "you can probably guess that we'll probably recommend WebLogic server, but the fact of the matter is we believe over half of the effort around creating service-oriented architecture has nothing to do with products."
He said that's where the people and the practice come in.
|
|
|
|
