Photo: Current and Future Software Trends

Photo: MomentumSI EA Team 2

Photo: MomentumSI EA Team

Service registries: now for cloud services?

Roy Schulte delivered the Monday morning keynote, setting the context for where we are today in the evolution of enterprise IT. He touched upon a number of things, and mentioned in passing that registries and repositories are going to gain prominence in the years ahead, beginning with the immediate future. Frank Kenney expressed similar sentiments four years ago, when I was here last time, co-presenting the just adopted UDDI version 3 on behalf of OASIS.

In the intervening four years we kept hearing about service registries and metadata repositories being finally ripe for massive deployment. Everyone pointed to SOA governance as a systemic problem and to the registry as a necessary piece of the solution. Indeed, adoption of registry and metadata management infrastructure spiked up and the market evolved quite a bit, perhaps most notably with emergence of CMDB as one of the outcomes through these years. (The causal relationship here is more direct than it may appear to be: for example, HP’s CMDB push is the direct result of its Mercury acquisition, which earlier acquired service registry leader Systinet. As a reminder of that, I saw Radovan Janecek, Systinet’s VP of Engineering, talking about HP’s CMDB vision later in the day.) But we are still in the early days, perhaps reflecting where we collectively are in our adoption of service orientation.

Service orientation itself evolved in these years. Interest in cloud-based computing is very high, if session attendance is any indication. With SOA being the dominant architectural paradigm, anything-as-a-service (XaaS) delivery model is viewed through the prism of service delivery requirements. David W. Cearley and David Mitchell Smith, in their session on the cloud platforms, offered this cloud service taxonomy:

·         System infrastructure

·         Application Infrastructure

·         Application

·         Information

·         Process

·         Ecosystem Management

Each type of cloud service supports a distinct set of service delivery capabilities -- from systems on the lowest level to composite applications and mashups on the highest. Depending on the requirements, cloud service adoption may involve getting in at system infrastructure level (cloud-based application execution), where there is legacy application engineered in a traditional single-tenant software framework. New software can be implemented on provisioning models higher up the technology stack, such as application or mashup platforms.

Reflecting this evolution of service delivery models, the David & David session also included mention of registry capabilities. It came up in the context of search, whereby services provided in the cloud by vendors and partners are required to be discoverable. Clearly, we are not talking about registry as Web 1.0 infrastructure, which is where the modern service registry originated. These registries would be company-specific, managed by enterprise IT departments. Indeed, the services’ location independence, afforded by properly designed SOA and deployed enabling technologies, makes it irrelevant to service consumers where the services are hosted, along with the other internal details of their delivery.

It was repeated throughout the day, including by David & David, that all enterprises will end up sooner or later as cloud service providers themselves. You will be not only consuming, but also providing cloud services to partners. Leaving other implications aside for now, metadata publishing and SLA compliance are among the concerns that require a deliberate metadata management architecture. Hopefully, by the time these requirements appear on our collective enterprise radar, the requisite processes and technologies will be deployed for the reasons we need them now. And these reasons are fundamentally the same as 4 years.

Photo: Jeff Schneider, Alex Rosen, and Tom Brown at Gatener AADI

Photo: Web Platforms-Doing Business In The Cloud

Photo: Tony Cook of MomentumSI

Web Platforms - Doing Business in the Cloud (Cearley and Smith)

Session: Web Platforms - Doing Business in the Cloud (Cearley and Smith)

Key Notes and Thoughts (by Ed Vazquez):

• Definition of Cloud: Services delivered over the internet using internet technologies as a service. Characterized by access to data and capabilities as a result of community, elastic, consumer-inspired, and spanning the network in a distributed manner. The "cloud" is not a stand-alone platofrm that is always purchased. In Ed's words, computing on the cloud basically means you didn't have to buy the hardware and software and configure and optimize it prior to deploying code - you just pick a pre-configured cloud and and design and deploy your software on a 'virtually (hardware cost) free' cloud platform. What hasn't been addressed by Gartner is "What happens when you have to charge consumers for optimization and maintenance of the cloud?" "What happens when you have applications and data that can't run on shared environments because of legal / regulatory compliance issues?"
  
  
• Examples of services on a cloud: Amazon EC2, S3, FPS, MTurk, FWS, DP, EZ Prints, salesforce.com, fore.com, Google App Enginge - consumers access, configure and / or extend the service and builds everything needed above the service boundary. In Ed's words, service consumers do the same thing during integration as they've always done, the provider service is just either on a cloud or not on a cloud.
  
  
• Development and Execution Models: Mashup (internal application accesses external service), Cloud Execution (internal build / store - production in the cloud), Full Cloud (everything in the cloud), and Hybrid. Smith maintains that it is best to start out with Full Cloud or Cloud Execution. In Ed's words, you can start anywhere, but more than likely you're going to start doing everything local and not on the cloud and hopefully, you can get to doing everything on the cloud, ideally. That said, this discussion lacked a critical discussion on the data / functionality that is typically regulated by corporate policy and, thus, appropriate models for corporate clouds vs. consumer clouds. In the future, I believe that Gartner will need to clearly distinguish and steal the "Corporate Cloud vs Consumer Cloud" paradigm for making future arguments for / against Cloud computing.
  
  
• Web Vendors leading the charge: Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
  
  
• Leading Vendors in the Game (Microsoft "Live" mesh and IBM OnDemand Blue Cloud and iDataplex and a partnership with Google).
  
  
• Some companies are beginning to build on their technology / IT excellence and monetize their technology platforms (Amazon). Some companies such as Wal-Mart, P&G, T-Mobile are positioned to where their supply chain and billing capabilities could be made available as a platform. In Ed's words, a company can establish a brand because of their competencies in Service Enablement and Platform Enablement. Gartner had the same assertions years ago around SOA that they now profess with Cloud Computing. Still, the monetization of cloud platforms is probably years away and aspects such as data security, bandwith monitoring, and SLA enforcements have yet to be identified by any leaders. Cloud computing is great for small, consumer applications at this point, but is nowhere near ready for Enterprise deployments. Still there may be opportunities for co-opetition for industry sectors and partners to leverage cloud computing technologies, canonical data models, canonical service models and integration methodologies to partner to build core platform functionality at a reduced cost to each - and out-position competitors. Cloud computing could enable soft-mergers of competitors seeking operational efficiencies in their platform development efforts. Less money on hardware and software may mean more money for actual application development and better, more agile business applications (Imagine not having to wait for hardware to be purchased, procured, configured, deployed, etc on small projects! The end of long lines in capacity planning! Rejoice. Rejoice)
  
  
• Nail-On-The-Head-ing Factor: 35%. Until the analysts begin to differentiate between Corporate Clouds and Consumer Clouds, the discussion will be too generalized to be useful for Corporate citizens to implement Enterprise Applications on "Clouds" that major platform vendors don't even support or have best-practices for in deployment "on a cloud."
  

Blog by Alkesh on Data Integration / MDM

Gartner Conference on "Data Integration Technology & Architecture" by Ted Friedman
SOA without the backbone of solid Data Integration (DI) practices, consistency and quality will result in garbage in (data) - garbage out. Majority of Gartner clients are enquiring for MDM. DI & MDM is inevitable because latency of data availability is coming down from batch mode to real time mode. Metadata (including ontology) is the critical core of data integration and management of meta data asset is very improtant to success of SOA. Market leaders in DI quadrant are IBM, Oracle, and Informatica.

Gartner Conference on "Selecting Integration Technology that will support your SOA and BPM Initiatives" by Jess Thomson
SOA and BPM are the enablers for Application integration. There are three application integration styles viz. Data Consistency, Multi step process and Composite applications. File based and ETL based data integrations add to latency of data. To overcome latency of data, ESB technology is sparing used in the industry. Gartner estimates that by 2012 more than 40% interfaces will be using ESB technology. Hub based integration architecture offer complex event monitoring. Gartner estimates that by 2012 more than 20% shops will use hub based architecture.

Thank you,
Alkesh
Cell: 512-587-0450

MomentumSI Booth: Daniel Feygin, Alkesh,Todd Biske (formerly MomentumSI), and David Bessman (Composite Software)

Hjalmer and Alkesh at the Gartner AADI MomentumSI

Hjalmer Danielson at our Gartner booth

Mobile Web 2.0

Session: Mobile Web 2.0 by Nick Jones

Mobile Web 2.0 by Nick Jones
Observations by: Ed Vazquez

Overview: Mobile Web 2.0 Principles: Business principles, cultural behaviors, technology and architecture, interaction principles. Web 2.0 and Mobile Web 2.0 are similar, but have unique challenges and considerations. The prerequisites for Mobile Web 2.0 - a 3G network AND a 3G handset. 3G is penetrating faster in the US (EV-DO and WCDMA) (95%) than in Western Europe (WCDMA) (70%) because of greater legacy system assets in the US - an exciting opportunity for US enterprise application development architects given that the US network may get stronger, faster.

Interesting Nick Jones Assertions (all assertions paraphrased):

'WiMax is a niche technology and have very limited consumption because there aren't any networks and there won't be any good wi-max enabled devices.' - Nick Jones

'The mobile web is a HUGE business opportunity over the next several years as many devices will go mobile and connect to other devices.' - Nick Jones

'The next big thing in the next five years is mobile phone screen projectors and larger screens (rollout screens) that will increase the working areas of those working on mobile phones.' - Nick Jones

'Your mobile application platform should not be built around Blackberry devices as it's a niche business-to-employee web application platform. The iPhones will actually surpass Blackberry sales this next year, to give it perspective and excels around business-to-consumer" web applications. The Blackberry is insignificant in the mobile web application 2.0 discussion' - Nick Jones

Core Nick Jones Thoughts and Assertions:

3 Kinds of Mobile Phones:
1. Smartphones and PDAs (high technology factor / low fashion factor)
2. Enhanced Phones (basic technology factor / high fasion)
3. Basic Phones.
Other "intelligent" wireless devices (widget enabled devices; texting; browsing internet devices that enable snippets of information via mobile networks (wi-fi).
Ed's Thoughts: In the near future, differentiating between mobile "phones" and mobile "devices" will be understood, widely, as irrelevant. There will simply be devices with mobile capabilities. We need to look at all business critical devices in terms of how they could help or enhance a mobile device network.

3 Major Challenges to the Mobile Web:
1. How does the URL get onto the device? (bluetooth, sms, mobiel email, IM containing URLs)
2. User Interaction - no mouse and every click loses users (speech recognition, contextual awareness, location, tilt sensors, gesture)
3. Content and Rendering on a small screen
Evolution of the Mobile Social Web: Mobile Web Social Systems will result in location based social networking.

Mobile Web through 2012:

• Emergence of "snap" interactions - an increase in transient interactions via mobile devices.
• Many inconsistent platforms.
• Many architectures and variants.
• Network Performance constraints.
• Operators want to be in the value chain.

Ed's thoughts: The first realized value of the mobile web will be in social networking. People want to find people for personal reasons. A functional analysis of those behaviors could lead to some serious opportunities for businesses in marketing efforts and contextual awareness with mobile devices. I'm sure many of these transactions will be "snap" and location or event driven. Finding a way to enable those apps on existing SOA and app infrastructure stacks will be the real challenge. Figuring out how private that data is will be another. Determining how ethical it is to track everyone is an entirely other consideration not addressed here.

• Mobile Web may have some advantages around low TCO, ease of implementing basic security, and rapid mobile application development opportunities. Ed's Thoughts: This is pure speculation. Show a business case, delivery timeline, and resource list for a single web-a
  
  
• First phase mobile applications should be simple and very achievable with current technologies (now through 2010). Second generation mobile applications (2010 - ?) will leverage services / legacy api's and new device technologies to result in rich user experiences and increased mobile application capabilities. Ed's Thoughts: I think the real opportunity will be moving enterprise applications to mobile devices for mobile work forces over the next 4 years. There are plenty of sales force, marketing, and operational support teams out there that need mobile device applications to improve productivity in the workforce. Once the enterprise realizes what they could have ... or finds an architect that can show how it can be delivered cost-effectively, that enterprise could create an entire secondary brand around its mobile application delivery platform capabilities.
  
  
• BBC, eBay, Yahoo (already working on second generation mobile web efforts), and Bango are already using the mobile web in 2008. Ed's Thoughts: Yep.
  
  
• Monetizing the mobile web could be challenging as business models around subscriptions, advertising, transactions, revenue sharing models, and fees are still being analyzed and defined. Ed's Thoughts: People still haven't figured out how to monetize SOA and services. Outside of SMS Text messaging for voting on American Idol, there aren't a lot of million dollar business models built around mobile web applications, yet. That said, I firmly believe that contextual applications will be built and rely on mobile devices for input and "awareness" - the days of building enterprise applications without mobile application awareness are numbered. Mobile application support and capabilities will need to be considered with every enterprise app dev effort within the next three years.
  

• Site to check out: Flock - mobile social networking in a browser.
  
  
• Important technologies required in the portfolio: thin client mobile application servers (Volantis, MobileAware), Content Authoring Tools (Flash, Silverlight, etc), Handset Emulators (Yospace), Browser Emulators (Opera, Nokia, Openwave), Mobile VPN / Optimizers.
  
  
• Important services required in the portfolio: hosted testing, site validation, authoring guidelineins, hosted aadaptation servers, buseinss support services, open source (WIRFL), partner APIs and services.
  
  
• Key thin-client Mobile Software, Platforms, and Vendors: Access, Nokia, Openwave, Microsoft, Opera, Adobe, Google, Apple.
  
  
• Sybase and Volantis are excellent opportunities to thin client mobile application servers. Volantis has even open sourced part of its application server. Pursue hosted versions rather than deploying fully (for cost reasons).
  
  
• Be very careful using AJAX on mobile applications - high latency on mobile networks.
  
  
• .mobi domains can be registered for mobile domains - but .mobi domains aren't required for mobile applications. very low consumption for .mobi domain names. You may only need to look at them to cyber-squat on domain names.
  

Ed's Thoughts & Summary:
This was, by far, the most exciting session I've attended, so far at the Gartner conference. Ok, I'll admit that I am a strong believer in the opportunities in front of the enterprise to own the third screen (mobile phone devices). Most of the current application development efforts revolve around the second screen (computers) and the first screen (tv) is emerging as a player in application development, but will probably be enabled first and foremost by mobile devices (see the third screen).

I think the ceiling is unlimited in mobile application design and delivery and it's the wide, wide West right now. While most folks are busy depating WOA and SOA and WS* and REST, I'd encourage the forward thinkers to take their middleware lessons to the forefront of enterprise application development on mobile platforms. This was a great foundation and framing of many things to come in mobile web application development.

Moving to Advanced SOA

Patterns and Guidelines for Starting with SOA and Moving to Advanced SOA by Yefim V Natis

Yefim, as always, delivered a solid road-map around SOA consumption patterns.

SOA Use Pattern 1: Multi-channel Applications - multiple business channels consuming a service-oriented application.

SOA Use Pattern 2: Composite ApplicationsComposite Applications - multiple applications creating a single application for business channels.

SOA Use Pattern 3: Busienss Process Orchestration (People and Services Interacting) - multiple applications orchestrated, using services, to support a single business process.

SOA Use Pattern 4: Service Oriented Enterprise - New functionality is delivered to the Enterprise - not new applications. Consumers are not connected to services - but to the infrastructure.

SOA Use Pattern 5: Federated SOA - Further recognition of the complexity of the enterprise. Not a recommended pattern. This is often the result of mutliple business units creating their own SOA methodologies and infrastructure (SAP Net-Weaver, Microsoft .net, IBM Websphere, Oracle SOA Suite, etc. all maintaining their own independence and operational platform in an enterprise).

Ed's Take:

Yefim theorizes that these patterns could / should exist independently in any major enterprise. In almost eight years of being a SOA practitioner and leader of SOA implementations in major enterprises, I would strongly disagree that these patterns are independent and might go so far as to say that they are not "patterns" but part of a larger common set of Enterprise Integration considerations. Every major enterprise I've worked at, actually implementing SOA initiatives, has had BPM initiatives, has had multiple platform vendors and competing business units with their own vested vendor relationships and commitments to vendors, is responsible (at a project / initiative level) for delivering applications to business units, and has multiple channels consuming a business critical application. There is value, however, in understanding that each of these are "Considerations" around a SOA implementation. In other words, let's understand the channels that will consume the SOA-ized application, let's understand the source systems, let's understand our integration platform, and let's understand future consumers of those services that the new SOA initiative will deploy, before we begin the SOA initiatieve.

Yefim nailed a few of the "Things to Avoid" in getting started with SOA.

The first "nail on the head" came with Yefim giving a 'holla to the "danger of forgetting the data" (hence the need for recognition of the importance of MDM as well as BPM with SOA initiatives that we've recognized for years).

The second "nail" came with the 12th Gartner restatement of the "danger of starting too big (with your SOA projects)" (the only people crazy enough to do a major SOA project as a first SOA are those that have completely outsourced anything beyond a SOA business case to some IBM team of 40 people that will spend the next 3 years deploying your new, great, grand major SOA initiative with a time and material contract using their "new" SOA Suites that are actually rebranded packages you bought four years ago).

The third "nail" came with the "anarchy vs dictatorship" recommendation. While Yefim's anarchy vs dictatorship was ridiculous (seriously, there is never a pure anarchy or pure dictatorship in any enterprise but its dramatic and people seem to swallow it for some reason), Yefim did point out that people and organizational alignment was critical to moving SOA initiatives along. Again, nothing new in this statement, but this is something that, even after being said for five years, seems to draw "oooooohs" and "aaaaaahs" from techies who think ws* is the coolest thing about SOA.

Best new Gartner Acronym in this session - NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here Syndrome).
NOTH - ing Factor (Nail on the Head - ing): 50%

View from the Marriott Orlando World Center

First post from my mobile phone

Welcome to Orlando :)

Sent from my iPhone