Welcome to the blog where IBMers exchange viewpoints, share their perspectives to provide more insight around service oriented architecture solutions, and delve into a range of SOA-related subjects. We want you to speak out on SOA through comments in the blog -- from where your organization stands on SOA adoption, to your challenges and experiences -- to share with the larger community the impact of SOA on your marketplace. Sandy Carter is IBM's Vice President, SOA & WebSphere Marketing, Strategy and Channels. Discover the entry points to SOA and how companies worldwide are making SOA pay right away.

Snokeling for the first time with a 5 year old!

Hey! I just arrived back from St Thomas and had a wonderful time! I took my daughter to Cokki Beach and Trunk Bay for some awesome snorkeling!!!
It was her first time and the excitement in seeing those fish was amazing! She of course laughed and leaked in a lot of water. Too funny but the energy and amazement made me realize there is more to life than SOA!!

Thanks for the great response on the SOA for dummies book! Keep the emails and requests coming in!

More exciting news on SOA later this week!

Here's to vacations, sand, and turquoise waters!

Cheers!

SOA driving Business Results!

Did you see the impact SOA is having on the market and the value delivered to our customers?

Read here!

SOA Drives Value

Order for FREE the SOA for Dummies book! Special Edition for IBM!

Now I am getting so many notes I want to provide you the website where you guys can go directly to order your very own SOA for Dummies Book! Happy Reading!

SOA for Dummies

SOA for Dummies Free Offer

Many thanks for the notes and pings on our SOA for Dummies -- the IBM edition! If you want a copy, please send me your address in a note to scarter@us.ibm.com!!

Thanks for the great response!!!

SOA for Dummies!

I love the "for dummies" series. You can learn about anything in a "for dummies" book! Since I travel around the world with the SOA Executive Summits, I still hear from many customers that they need a very simple way to explain SOA.

Because of these requests, when Carol Barodi (yes, the author of Internet for Dummies) approached us on sponsoring a book on SOA for dummies we jumped at it. She partnered with Judith Hurwitz, both well respected authors. and they have written “SOA for Dummies”, a special IBM Edition. SOA for Dummies IBM Edition covers what SOA is, why it matters, how it can impact businesses, how to get started with SOA, and what one IBM customer has done with SOA.

You can request a FREE copy of SOA for Dummies – IBM Edition by responding to my blog or by emailing me at scarter@us.ibm.com!

You'll also want to check out the latest SOA enablement resources including a SOA Best Practices: Real World Lessons Learned webcast scheduled for August 10. You will hear European IT industry authorities Macehiter Ward-Dutton and Freeform Dynamics discuss in detail the findings from their collaborative SOA analysis: SOA—Lessons from the Front Line. Register today for this informative webcast on ibm.com/soa!!!

SOA Contest in China!!

China is a fabulous place -- actually one of my favorite places to visit due to the energy and excitement in the Chinese people. I would recommend several very key spots like Xian where the terra cotta soldiers are -- check it out this one !!

Because of the explosive growth in China, we designed a contest for China university students. We asked them to build an SOA application using a virtual customer that is facing application integration problem with two legacy ERP and CRM systems, and want to improve the operation process and increasing business flexibility. 5 students can form a team, act as a SI and design a SOA solution for the customer. The whole contest is to simulate a full selling cycle of an IT project: the first stage is collecting proposal, the second is to have the top solutions (in this program, top 15 teams) to do presentation and bidding, and the top 5 solution will enter last phase -- system implementation.

We have already over 410 teams from 70 universities. Teams in the IBM China SOA Contest established over 350 blogs such
Leading team . They're the #1 team in the first phase of the contest. The blog's in chinese, but here's a basic transation of the blog from Google: China Blog

What do you think? I am looking forward to announcing the winner in November while I am in China!

Fireworks in NYC!

Happy Late 4th of July!!! Take a look at this exciting fireworks video that I shot in New York.

Also note the electronic version of the July edition of Certification Magazine contains an article on our SOA Certification. It hits the news on June 25.

Are you SOA certified??

A Great Report on Coscon leveraging SOA!

I just received a report that Gartner did on Coscon, a shipping company in China, how they have deployed SOA and their learnings. Coscon undertook an SOA intitiatve to rationalize its core port operation systems and improve overall business agility and responsiveness.

They learnings they shared were:

* Linking IT and Business together. Early on!

* Ensure availability of technical staff and skill (in fact, skills are one of the most important areas for customers!)

* Include senior business analysts

Sandy

Categories : [   coscon  ]

Jun 22 2006, 02:53:00 PM EDT Permalink

Paris and Prague

In Paris, with over 500 attendees, we were able to share real customer stories and deployments as well as new news like our own SOA Business Catalog..

You should really check this out as it allows you to really bring home the value of reuse and the industry or business push of SOA. I would be curious as to your best practices around the infusion of the business and IT.

In Prague, we had 90 very high level business leaders to hear about SOA. Very insightful crowd -- we hosted a dinner at St Agnes's Convent (Klášter sv. Anežky). It is a monastery built in the 1230s -- and since one of the main value propositions is reuse, a customer from an Oil Company in Russia said "I see the tie in to SOA of this dinner location. You have us in a monastery that today we are reusing as a restaurant!"

Today, St Agnes's is used by the National Gallery to display a collection of European medieval art. Check it out!

I will talk to you later!!!

Sandy

Categories : [   soa_business_catalog  |  soa_summit  ]

Jun 20 2006, 04:37:00 PM EDT Permalink

SOA Summit In London!

The SOA summit was a great way to hear from the London customers doing SOA, like City University, Standard Life (Ian writes that "Our measured re-use benefit now stands at 8.5 miillion sterling (16 million US) Feel free to quote us. Well over 100 applications from large to small deployed to our SOA now and many more planned", Norwich Union, and Travelex!

Check out John Patrick's Blog on the SOA AR day as well!

Sandy

Categories : [   soa_business_centric_summit  |  soa_summit  ]

Jun 06 2006, 08:34:00 PM EDT Permalink

Stuck in NYC -- in my car!

"As much as I like Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, I hope those CIO's didn't pick it as Starry Night was painted in 1889 near the mental asylum of Saint-Remy, in, as it turns out, 13 months before his death....

SOA is on its way up and the limit doesn't seem to be in site... So that would make Piet Mondrain's "Broadway Boogie Woogie" (the yellow line one) the best choice. As Mondrain wanted the "...infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space..." that "...stretches far beyond its borders..." as told by David Sylvester about Piet Mondrain.

While (still) sitting here pondering life in the rain, I saw Elisabeth's blog! and the latest review of the InfoWorld SOA day! http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/archives/2006/05/ebizq_audio_pod.php

I head to London on Monday for the SOA Summit there. Will post in my best british accent!

Sandy


Jun 02 2006, 11:58:00 AM EDT Permalink

MOMA!!

We asked 100 CIO which art piece reminded them more of SOA. I will tell you how they voted in my next entry.


May 12 2006, 03:10:40 AM EDT Permalink

Thinking through semantics for SOA

A lot of discussions have occured around semantics for SOA. Any thoughts on these definitions for SOA "terms"..

Service – a repeatable business task represented by a software module deployed on network accessible platforms provided by the service provider. Its interface is described by a service description. It exists to be invoked by or to interact with a service requestor. It may also function as a requestor.

Service Orientation – an approach to integrate business tasks as loosely coupled, linked services

Service Oriented Architecture –An architectural style of the structure of a software system in terms of its components and the services they provide, without regard for the underlying implementation of these components, services and connections between components

Composite application - a set of related & integrated services that support a business process built on an SOA

Components - Definition of a modular unit of functionality, accessed through one or more interfaces. A component may be composed of other components, but a component is not necessarily a service.

Service Component Architecture (SCA) - a set of specifications which describe a model for building applications and systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture. SCA extends and complements prior approaches to implementing services, and SCA builds on open standards such as Web services.

Business Process Management - Covers the full range of application-to-application, inter-application, workflow and person-to-person process management, including process design, automation, management, and continuous improvement.

Service Registry - a searchable registry of service descriptions where service providers may publish their service descriptions. Service requestors may find services and obtain binding information (in the service descriptions) for services during development for static binding or during execution for dynamic binding.

SOA, BPM and Model-driven Development: The Keys to the SOA Kingdom!

Reading more deeply and talking to several customers while icing my ankle, it seems that most companies deliver modeling to help organizations fully visualize, comprehend, and document business processes in order to close the gap that exists between an organization’s lines of business and IT’s understanding of the business drivers. Given that a business process is a defined set of activities leading to specific results, modeling provides the added assurance that best practices are well documented and communicated throughout the organization before deployment.

For example, one large insurer is having their business analysts use modeling to define alternative scenarios, differing in resource allocation, branching assumptions at decision points in the flow, and other parameters, and see which alternative results in the lowest cost, fastest average cycle time, lowest percentage of service level agreements violations, or other optimum business measure. In addition, tbecause they leveraged simulation can help reveal bottlenecks in the process, allowing new alternative scenarios to be analyzed -- resulting in significant time and cost savings before they are implemented throughout the SOA.

I believe that BPM with SOA is the keys the kingdom and SOA will help facilitate the next phase of the business process evolution. The evolution is occurring now because of the heightened need for enterprises to compete more effectively by adapting to market changes faster, continuously improving efficiencies and streamlining collaboration across traditionally siloed departments.

Well, at least it may be the key that opens the door that allows you to explore all the benefits to SOA. What are your thoughts? By the way, I have now proceeded in my recovery and hope to be walking with my cane at the NYC SOA summit -- that is sold out!

If you are one of the lucky 400 that got a seat, I'll see you there!

Til then....back to icing the ankle!

Sandy

Categories : [   business_process_mgmt  |  model_driven_development  ]

Apr 25 2006, 02:39:00 AM EDT Permalink

April 3 SOA News -- SOA Entry Points!

Yesterday we announced a series of 5's for SOA.

5 SOA entry points based on a study of 500 customers from Mercer. The 5 are: People, Process, information, Reuse, and Connectivity!

We highlighted 5 Real customers using these SOA entry points for Value (Pep Boys, Harley Davidson, Delaware Electric, Magna Steyr, and Wuestenrot and Wuerttembergische AG (W and W AG).

On the business side, we have 3 entry points for customers looking to start their SOA journey! People centric collaboration, Business Process Management, Information as a service. Now we know that you could do BPM or Collaboration without SOA, but with SOA the value grows.

For instance around BPM, for many years companies have wanted the magic potion to fix, improve, modify process activity. But IT has been the biggest inhibitor. SOA changes the game in this space by allowing processes to be represented as services and components. As such, the service-based process now becomes re-usable, flexible, and can be modified and re-deployed more quickly. SOA turns processes into parts (called "services") so the specific part of the process can be improved, optimized, and then reassembled with other parts of the process.

Or for collaboration, SOA will enable this user experience and ensure consistent levels of service are met each step of the way. SOA allows customers to create, deploy, and update composite applications faster with SOA portlets. As application portlets are created or converted to "service-based" portlets, you can aggregate and integrate these portlets faster and more economically to get the collaborative user interface and view into your business that you need.

Or for Information, SOA drives further success Information delivered as a service provides extensive options to a company to allow for packaging, transformation, and distribution of the information to the right people at the right time. Information as a service, as a part of an SOA ensures consistency in sources and data rules, aligns information with business processes, provides business context to information, uncovers insightful relationships hidden within information, provides a basis for trust in information, and enables tighter control over information.

For the IT entry points, the 2 are Reuse, where a strong view of being able to reuse both IT assets and business logic. To build an SOA, you look at what you already have (people, applications, business processes, etc.), and use existing resources to streamline business processes, cut development time, ensure consistency through the organization, and save money. Based on open standards, IBM's offerings were created to allow a company to extend the value from their existing software by service-enabling it and then reuse the business value that comes from that service again and again. Firms can:

-Enhance flexibility by reduce duplication of function by creating services to be shared across the enterprise
-Leverage proven core applications and function through services enablement, through wrappering or other methods

In fact, a study by Software Productivity Research found that it is five times less expensive to reuse existing services and applications than to re-write them.

And finally Connectivity. SOA connectivity allows users to take an existing business process and deliver it through a different business channel with minimal rework. So for example, if you have a business process like opening a new account that you deliver through a call center, you can deliver the same process through a web site or a kiosk by leveraging this kind of connectivity. Doing so will ensure a secure, consistent user experience and save a great deal of cost. By the same token, SOA Connectivity lets you reach out to your trading partners with secure, services-based connectivity beyond your firewall. The Enterprise Integration Challenge report from Software Strategies found that use of an Enterprise Service Buses was two to four times less expensive than custom-built integration or FTP.

So tell me what you think? Do these entry points seem like ones you could use?

We have an SOA business value tool that will allow you to sit down and determine your ROI from these Entry points as well. Let me hear from you!