| QUESTION & ANSWER |
SOA report misinterpreted, analyst says |
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By John Hogan, News Editor
14 Jan 2004 | SearchWebServices.com |
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"Service-oriented architecture" (SOA) is a term that many in IT hold in high regard, since it refers to a potentially valuable principle of application design. The concept isn't a new one -- it's been around since the early days of
CORBA -- but Web services technology has breathed new life into SOA. Since the next step for SOA is the inevitable hype stage, some fans of the concept pointed an accusing finger at ZapThink LLC after the analysis firm released a report on the SOA product market, which it said would reach $43 billion by 2010. Critics ask, "How can you assign a value to SOA if there's no such thing as an SOA product?" But ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg says that some people have made incorrect assumptions about the report without actually reading it. In an interview, Bloomberg talked about SOA-enabling products, the morphing of the application server market and the dreaded "next big thing" label. ZapThink says the market for "core" service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology will reach $43 billion by 2010. But some say that SOA is simply a software design principle, and that there is no such thing as an SOA "product." Can you explain what you meant in your report?
Jason Bloomberg: We see service-oriented security, management [and business] process [products] -- and tools as well -- all sort of becoming markets in their own right.
Over time, as some of the large vendors get up to speed … we see this primary framework for building an SOA sort of being the core product that [software] companies will be offering over time.
Who will be the big players?
Bloomberg: IBM is probably the closest to this full-featured SOA implementation product with their on-demand operating environment that's based on WebSphere.
You describe the emergence of something called "SOA implementation frameworks." What are those?
Bloomberg: An SOA implementation framework would be a product or a suite of products that add all of the capabilities that a company would need to build, run and maintain service-oriented architecture. This would include security, management, process, integration, as well as the tools you would need for development.
You can think of it, in essence, as the next generation of an application server platform. But it's not just a platform. When you think of [a] platform, you think in terms of runtime environment, plus scalability technology, and that's clearly part of it. But it's really more of a framework than a platform in that it's a collection of tools and capabilities that you would need to put together an SOA.
You say that these frameworks will "completely subsume" the application server platform market by 2010. How so?
Bloomberg: Application servers first came about as a way of providing scalability to your back-end data sources when you wanted to have a Web site. And that really gave rise to n-tier architecture. So the whole n-tier architecture movement came about as a result of the scalability needs of the Internet and e-business. Well, if you think about service-oriented architecture as being the way to help companies leverage the power of standards-based services … now you need to have more than just an application server. Now you need a whole range of capabilities.
How will these frameworks affect the Web services tools and XML appliances that companies have already bought?
Bloomberg: The SOA tools you would need -- development or testing tools -- are part of something that an SOA implementation framework vendor would offer. It could be a single product, or it could be a family of products that work together. It would definitely not be some sort of monolithic, single-vendor offering, because the whole idea behind Web services is to have interoperability. The tools would definitely be a part of that.
There will continue to be XML appliances, but we would see that you would have security appliances that are a part of a service-oriented security solution. You might have management appliances that are part of a service-oriented management solution. We see those developing over time and the market shifting around.
So this wasn't a wasted investment?
Bloomberg: Definitely not. These appliances will continue to be important for certain tasks to be relegated to hardware for performance or manageability reasons. But going out and buying an XML appliance and calling it that, that's a temporary thing.
| | | | "There's no panacea here -- no pixie dust where all you need to do is buy some SOA and everything's going to be fine." -- Jason Bloomberg, ZapThink senior analyst | | | |
You apply a pretty specific "window of opportunity" (2005 to 2007) for vendors to enter the SOA space. How did you arrive at that?
Bloomberg: You have to get a sense as to what some of the established vendors are doing and what their time frames are. If you look at what IBM is doing, CA, HP, BMC, Compuware, Borland … you can extrapolate when some of these vendors are going to come to dominate some of these markets. That's the window of opportunity for some of the smaller players.
So, once the big players refine their SOA-enabling products, no one else will be able to challenge them?
Bloomberg: There's always going to be room for innovation. There's always room for startups because of the forces that are specific to IT, like Moore's Law, and the fact the prices are always going down. But those opportunities for new innovation are going to shift. As far as Web services security, Web services management, service-oriented process -- the window is only for the next few years.
SOA seems dangerously close to becoming the dreaded "next big thing" in IT. What do companies really need to know about SOA, and what is simply hype?
Bloomberg: SOA is essentially based on the principle of loose coupling, where you can have distributed systems that can be controlled independently of one another and can communicate with each other without needing to control each individual system. Loose coupling has some overhead associated with it. It takes extra work, extra effort, extra processing power in order to provide that loose coupling.
Loose coupling is useful when you have heterogeneous environments. It's useful if you have multiple participants, each with their own systems and no central point of control, which would be a typical B2B (business-to-business) situation. That's when taking a service-oriented approach can solve a lot of the problems with integration that companies have today.
Integration is soaking up resources at many, many large and midsized companies. They're spending too much. Their integration is risky. Their existing IT is brittle. It's hard to make changes. It's expensive. That's when SOA makes sense, because now you can provide a layer of abstraction that makes it much more straightforward to deal with heterogeneous environments in a way that provides greater business agility.
So what's the catch?
Bloomberg: The biggest challenge with SOA is architecture. Architecture is difficult to understand, difficult to implement. It's not like SOAs are going to be easy. There's no panacea here -- no pixie dust where all you need to do is buy some SOA and everything's going to be fine.
It's going to be difficult. Companies are going to get it wrong. It's something that companies should understand before they get into it to realize the value proposition -- and to take one step at a time and not jump into the deep end if they're not ready.
Does that mean implementing an SOA is more of a business decision than an IT decision?
Bloomberg: Technology as a whole is a set of resources that are designed to meet business needs. Business goals for agility and meeting customer needs translate into technology goals and, often, SOAs are a way to meet those goals.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Is the window of opportunity closing for service-orientation vendors?
SOA product market to hit $43B by 2010
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