Bradley D. Brown

In today’s blog entry I’m going to talk about our Agile SOA technology!

iPerspective

As I mentioned, iPerspective is our technology that enables our Agile SOA methodology.  iPerspective makes all of your data and business logic look like Web Services and Periscope makes all of your data look like it’s in an Oracle database.  In other words, both are virtualization technologies.  They make non-common platforms operate in a homogenous environment.

Periscope

Periscope is our technology that turns any service into a query.  In other words, you can query from a Web Service as if the data is coming from your database.

Imagine for a minute if you had the ability to write a query from a Web service.  I’m calling this “Service as a Query” or “Query from a Service” or “Query Service” for short…

For example, let’s say you wanted to write a query against a Web service from http://www.thomas-bayer.com/ that contains an operation called getBank.  The service contains a bank ID (biz).

select bankName, bankId, location, plz

from   thomas_bayer_bank_service

where biz = 20041133

Powerful, right?  Absolutely!  Or let’s say you want to query from http://www.abundanttech.com/ ”dead or alive” service and call the getTodaysBirthdays operation (that has no parameters):

select *

from   todays_birthdays

Or let’s say you used Yahoo Pipes to pull Oracle’s current stock price and then you want to query from a RESTful service to get this information - now:

select current_stock_price, link, details

from   yahoo_pipe_oracle

Or what if you want to query from Google:

select *

from   google

where  searchString = ‘Bradley D. Brown’

Web Services allow you to run a program on another server as if it’s on the same server.  You don’t need to know the operating system, the hardware platform, the programming language or much of anything about the source system.   You simply run the program on another server.  That’s what a Web Service is.  Just think about the power of being able to query from ANY data source as if that data is in your own database.  That’s what I’m calling a Query Service!

Rolta’s iPerspective product allows you quickly expose your existing business logic and data as Web Services.  As discussed below, iPerspective adds key features to your service deployment.  Rolta’s Periscope product gives you Query Service functionality right out of the box.  You can query from ANY Web Service with a simple SQL Query!  Imagine the power of this type of functionality.  Any product that uses a JDBC driver can now query from any Web Service as if the data is on the same system.  That’s powerful!

Differentiators

Here are some of the key iPerspective differentiators:

·                     Federated (i.e. cross DB) queries

–     Security

o   i.e. if you want put a digest, LDAP, single sign-on layer on top of services – with a button click

·                     All different bindings of the WSDL (i.e. old formats to new)

·                     Release management - Grouping of objects into different releases of services

·                     A repository of your services -

o   i.e. a pretty complete stack all in one

·                     Extended object support – we support a lot of things that JDev didn’t in the past – i.e. overloaded functions in a package, record types, and MANY, MANY more – basically any Oracle ERP package/API can be turned into a service

·                     Dynamic service - We have a service type that allows you to call it and pass in your SQL statement and we have security options that allow you to restrict what objects can be used and you can lock down the gateway or allow the service to accept this and you can pass in a federated query too

·                     Virtual private service - ability to provide access to a service that gives a customer only their data

·                     ApEx, Sensedia and UDDI support - We deploy our service repository to a number of other repositories

·                     RESTful services - with a click, you can make your release a RESTful release

·                     Auto deployment - we can deploy to 1 server or 100 at once

·                     Open Adaptor API – we have an open API for Security, Gateways. Code generation

Open Architecture Model for iPerspective

iPerspective is the middle man between your data or business logic and your consumers.  Data meaning databases, files, etc.  Business logic meaning code that you’ve already written.  By consumers I mean the things that will use your existing data and business logic.  Things like mashups or dashboards, workflow or BPEL processes, or applications that will integrate to other applications.

iPerspective is built on open technology and it’s an open architecture as well.  What does this mean for you?  If it’s built on open technology, why not just go out and download all of the open source technologies on your own?  Well, they have shortcomings and they are difficult to pull together.  We’ve done the hard work for you.  You might ask – what do you mean by an “open architecture?”  iPerspective provides open APIs to allow you to add new functionality to it.  If you want to interface to some data source that we don’t support today, it’s easy to do so.

iPerspective sits between the source data and business logic and the consumers…so it includes security.  iPerspective is flexible – it has an open architecture.  You can add your own data sources, gateways, code generators, security, etc.

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile soa

In today’s blog entry, I’d like to talk about our Agile SOA process - the BeTteR process!

 

 

The BeTteR Process

Our BeTteR process is an Agile SOA methodology…so let’s talk about that now.

TUSC’s SOA Guide: the BeTteR Methodology

This methodology reduces risk.   It also ends up taking far less time to get to your final solution.  It’s really a pretty simple, but effective approach.  Using our iPerspective technology, you develop services within minutes.  It’s literally as simple as exposing existing data or business logic or writing new business logic (i.e. courser granularity) or data logic (i.e. a SQL query or a view).  Using Agile and iPerspective, we build a service and then the end user can see what’s built using rapid prototyping and tools like Oracle Application Express or any service consuming product (there are MANY)…in other words, they get to “try” it out.  Then we revise the functionality based on the feedback loop…which results in building the new services and so on.  This FAST feedback loop accomplishes the goals on the left…

Build, then try, then get feedback and revise – quick turns.  This is only possible with iPerspective…no other way!

BeTteR process:

·                     Reduces risk

·                     Shorter time-to-solution

·                     Simple approach

·                     Built-in precision tuning

With iPerspective:

·                     Build services in minutes!

·                     Manage services

·                     Flexibly!

·                     Easily!

Flexible Deployment and Fast ROI

On the bottom of the figure below, you’ll see all of your applications, business logic and data throughout your organization.  On the top, you’ll notice those service consuming products – i.e. mashups, mobile applications, application to application integration, workflow processes, etc.  In the middle you have your services.  iPerspective exposes those existing assets as business services…

iPerspective provides for flexible deployment, which results in fast ROI

iPerspective is effectively a middleware.  It connects your applications to your consuming apps.  Mashups, app to app, or workflows…it creates Web Services…

TUSC: Your SOA Guide

With Agile SOA, you can create quick turns between your business and IT groups.  This positions you to provide efficiency, risk reduction, and corporate learning to your company.  We have a number of service offerings around SOA.  These start with what we call SOA Today and move up the chain from there.  iPerspective is our software solution that allows for these quick turns.  We would love to help you through your SOA journey – no matter where you are on that journey.  Some people are still trying to valid whether SOA is real – they might be trying to understand why there is value in SOA and we have customers who have been doing SOA for 5 years.  Let’s talk a little more about SOA Today…just in case you’re on the early part of the SOA learning curve.

We also have services wrapped around our technology.  We can start at education (SOA Today), a roadmap, an assessment, etc…we have a complete line of SOA services.

SOA can fight your fears and position you well for the economic recovery

·                     Efficiency

·                     Risk reduction

·                     Corporate learning

TUSC is your SOA Guide to success!

·                     SOA Today - Fast transformation to service-oriented IT

·                     SOA Maturity - Optimizing your enterprise operations

·                     iPerspective - Linking your services to your business needs

Gaining Early, Lasting Buy-in

SOA Today is our starting point for SOA.  It starts with the workshop that you see in the upper lefthand quarter.  This is where we talk about your requirements and what you’re trying to accomplish.  The next step is the bootcamp, which is where we apply the requirements to the principles of SOA.  From there we go into visioning – once you know your requirements and about the principles of SOA, we can work together to figure out the roapmap for your first release of services.  In the jumpstart we’ll develop 2-5 services after a comprehensive design and architecture review.  The process is iteriative, so it just keeps going from there…

Let’s talk about iPerspective more now.

This figure shows SOA Today and what it typically includes:

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa

Yesterday’s blog entry was a great segway for Agile.  Let’s talk about the agile-based development methodology.  Keep in mind, Agile can be part of the entire cycle – not really just development.  In other words, it’s part of the design process, testing, everything.

Agile Provides QUICK Results

The advantage of Agile is that it provides quick results.  A release is a group of iterations.  An iteration is a short period in which you’ll complete an entire cycle of design to development.  Many things occur concurrently rather than in serial.  This is part of the power of Agile.  Additionally, the cycles are short.  Internally we initially did 1 week iterations.  We later moved from 1 week to 2 week iterations.  So every 2 weeks we’re determining which features we’re going to get into our product and at the end of the 2 weeks, we have an official release of the product.  We do bi-daily builds of the entire product.  If you break the build, you buy the donuts or bagels for the team!  One build is for the US developers and the other is for our team in India.  But…since we tend to be developing nearly 24×7, the builds are really for everyone – anything that’s checked in, gets built.  The build is automatically checked to make sure the primary functionality is working.  Good  builds are automatically deployed to all test servers.  Each day the test team gets to work on the latest and greatest build!  If you have a new feature that MUST make it into the product, how long will it be before you actually get to see it?  For us, it’s 4 weeks at the most…2 weeks at the least.  I guess technically it could be within 12 hour…i.e. in the next build.  With our Agile methodology, you can produce results quickly!  Agile is not for the weak or meek.  It will accentuate your flaws.

In the construction industry, we say we “stacked the deck” with contractors – i.e. when you bring in the drywall, paint, carpet and other trades in all on top of each other.  That is pretty much what Agile does too.  The product management team is determining the priorities (i.e. for specific stories) for the next iteration, while the design team is estimating stories in Small, Medium and Large (shirt size) chunks.  The teams then meet to determine which stories will be included in the iteration…and the process goes on from there.

If a develop runs out of things to do – there is a constant backlog of stories – i.e. what we should work on next, etc.  This is powerful!  You don’t see results like this in a waterfall project.

Again, quick iterations are key – there’s still design – unlike RAD or XP.  You’re stacking the deck like in contracting.

Agile is:

·                     Short iterations allow your customer to see what they are asking for quickly

·                     It does not imply a lack of design, rather it’s more like stacking the deck

·                     Agile provides a constant backlog of “ready to develop” tasks

The Agile Scrum

“Two Pillars” of Scrum

There are 2 pillars of the scrum - team empowerment and adaptability.  I’ve worked on projects where the project manager said “you have 16 hours to complete the task.”  And I’ve thought – huh?  That’s not possible…or there’s more than you think is here…or the more I dig, the more I find.  You can read the bullets here.  The beauty of this process is that you can adapt to changes when they occur.

Empowerment, changing with the business…that’s what Agile does…it does not fix the issues – it highlights them in a HUGE way!

Team empowerment

·                     Once teams are given work to do, they are responsible for figuring out how to do it.

·                     The team does the best it can during each increment.

·                     While a team works, their only interaction with management is to tell management what is getting in their way and needs to be removed to improve their productivity.

Adaptability

·                     Scrum uses “punctuated equilibrium”.

·                     The team maintains an equilibrium during each increment, insulated from outside disturbance.

·                     Increments are punctuated at the end of every sprint so that the team and management can evaluate what should be done during the next increment; this decision is based on what the team has accomplished and what the environment dictates is the next most important thing to do.

 Once Scrum is underway, teams and management find it easy to focus.  Every request is easily evaluated by, “What’s that got to do with delivering the code?”

Sprinting

I’ve provided a sample sprint planning meeting agenda below.  On the left, you can see how detailed the “chunks” of work are based on the stage it’s in.  For example, you will likely know chunks of items that you want to accomplish in the next release – for example, rework UI.  You might have huge undertaking that are past the next release – such as develop end user workbench.  From there, you can see that the closer the stories are to the current sprint, the smaller the items are.  For the current sprint, every task needs to be outlined – i.e. it must be VERY detailed!

This graphic shows how things go from concepts down to tasks.  But the design is constant.  We spend an entire day or 2 at the beginning of every iteration / sprint.

 Sample Sprint Agenda

·                     Opening, Welcome, Intros, Agenda

·                     Product Vision & Roadmap

·                     Development Status, Architecture, Previous Sprint

·                     Velocity In Previous Sprints

·                     Team – Availability and Capacity

·                     “Done” Review Definition

·                     Product Backlog:  Review and Select

·                     Tasking Out – Estimates – Ownership

·                     Challenges – Dependencies – Risks

·                     Review:  Capacity Required

·                     Review:  Risks & Mitigations

·                     COMMIT!

·                     Parking Lot, Action Items

·                     Close

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa

We (Rolta) recently annouced a partnership with Rally.  Why?  Because Agile makes you more productive.  It will help you succeed!  One such press release was in Tech Rockies and all 201 press releases are available as well.  I thought I’d take some time to blog my thoughts about Agile over the next few blog entries.

In this series of blog entries, the goal is to help you, the reader understand why Agile SOA will make your efforts successful.  Service-orientation / SOA is not best done in a huge waterfall effort.  Long, big projects are killers especially in tough economic times.  The quicker you can show success, the quicker you’ll win those new projects, get more business, save money, or whatever your goals may be.  The Agile process allows for quick wins through quick turns.  Like in the retail business, quick turns are good!  Quick turns will give you quick feedback and allows you to change as your requirements come together or change.  It’s also important to know that our approach is a best of breed approach to SOA.  In other words, you don’t need to pick an entire technology stack day one – rather iPerspective gives you the necessary components of the stack to get you going today.

Agile is a development methodology that’s not RAD, not Extreme Programming (XP) or anything like that…it involves releases of the entire piece of software through iterations.  The whole idea is to allow the business to work with IT, to see the results, provide feedback, etc.  You see a couple of the important terms above – quick turns and quick feedback.  Traditional SOA has been done in a waterfall method – there’s no value in re-writing things for the sake of re-writing.  In other words, there’s no direct value in SOA – the value is in “x” – something else.  With SOA you get to re-use existing assets, but if you don’t need to reuse anything…it would be of no value. SOA might allow a company to do some new things – like mashups, application to application integration or a new workflow.

The ability to rapidly modify service offerings is becoming a key to success in today’s turbulent economy. Many companies are turning to SOA to help their business reduce development effort and achieve agility, but implementing SOA effectively has proved a daunting challenge all its own. How can today’s IT managers and CIOs realistically propose SOA and quickly deliver benefits without risking their jobs?

This series will explain why historic SOA implementations have failed, how you can benefit from innovative software that fundamentally transforms the complexity of implementing SOA to an “instant” task, and how an Agile, iterative approach can deliver rapid ROI for your business and ultimately lower total cost of ownership. In a time where budgets can be cut at a moment’s notice, this paper aims to ensure you derive value from your SOA initiatives in weeks and become the “hero” for your business.

Introduction

First let’s talk about our Agile SOA methodology and then will share some case studies on how organizations generate revenues quickly, get feedback from users, and ultimately save time and money.  Some people save money by using having rapid feedback with end users.  Others use it to quickly demonstrate what can be done with the services and then leave it to their B2B customers to develop their own UI when customers ask for functionality beyond their out of the box UI.  So they save money by not having to do the UI enhancements or workflow development themselves – rather they drove it out to their customers.

First background on SOA will be provided, we’ll talk about Agile and how it works, then we’ll talk about how you can use Agile and iPerspective to give you quick turns, which will result in quick wins.  This is our BeTteR process (build, try, retry)…so let’s get started.

Topics in this series include:

·                     Introduction to Service Orientation

·                     Agile, Agile, Agile

·                     Quick Turns (with iPerspective)

·                     BeTteR process

·                     Build, Try, Revise

In this entry, I’ll cover the Introduction to Service Orientation…

Slaying Daemons and Ghosts

We all have those daemons and ghosts that keep us up at night…hopefully not every night, but it happens once in a while.  What is that keeps you up at night?  I’ve been in business for myself since I was about 10 years old.  From delivering newspapers and collecting weekly to starting TUSC, which what was a $50M business in 2006.  I can assure you that cash flow became a concern when I was 10 – people didn’t answer their door when I rang the bell – for their $1.40 a week newspaper…and when you’re collecting $50M in revenue, DSO (days sales outstanding) increases.  Each day equates to $140k and at 10% interest, that’s a net cost of $14k in interest per DSO…that adds up to a lot of money in no time!  So if you can reduce your DSO, you’re making money!  Cash flow is a daemon for most every business.

Has your firm cut “fat” and then “muscle” and you’re now into the bone?  What’s next?  I’ve been there!  Everyone picks up more and more and everyone’s “happy” to have a job – as they say “it beats the alternative” – right?  It does, but the more you can do, the better off you’ll be.

Then there is the uncertainty and risk of it all.  When will we hit the bottom?  If we knew that, we could do a perfect pro-forma and figure out exactly what to cut and when…but it’s not that simple is it?  So how do you survive?  When will it turn?  Are we at the bottom now?  Obviously the more you can save and the faster you can save it…the longer you can hold out before you have to make any cuts.  The more you cut, the longer it will take you to recover.  The greatest time of opportunity is when the market recovers.  That’s when there is a shortage of firms in business and that’s when the profit margins are at their highest.  You’ll far exceed your losses in gains – but only if you survive.  So it’s a tightrope that we all balance.

The faster you can learn from your users, the more you stay ahead of things, the more you’ll be ahead of the curve.  How can you accomplish this?  Quick wins!  If you can support an Agile enterprise, it will streamline your enterprise.

How long does it take you from the time you have a great new idea until you actually see it?  With Agile, the maximum time is 2 times your iteration time.  Our iteration time is 2 weeks, so the maximum time is 4 weeks.  More about this shortly.

The bottom line is that long projects won’t fly when you’re trying to save money – quick wins are the key!

What keeps you up at night?

·                     Cash flow in a declining world economy?

·                     Efficiency: doing more after cutting into the “muscle?”

·                     Uncertainty and risk?

·                     Surviving until the recovery

Positioning for the recovery

·                     Learning faster, better -> ahead of the curve

·                     Infrastructure and processes to reliably support an agile, streamlined enterprise

Service-oriented Solutions

This is a quote from Gartner, #G00163409:

“Most midsize and large software projects target a service-oriented software model.  Service-oriented applications are modular, and the modules (services and clients) are loosely coupled, shareable and distributable, and are encapsulated behind separately documented programmatic interfaces. Support of such architecture requires a multifunctional, underlying application infrastructure technology often assembled by users from products of potentially different vendors. Some users prefer a best-of-breed approach to selecting their enabling technologies, although this approach requires users to act as system integrators (SIs) in assembling the end-to-end enabling platform for the project.”

In the past we were very technology oriented.  I’m sure you remember terms like “re-engineering” – it’s better to fit the business process into the technology – not really, but that’s what we thought at the time.  Companies moved to COTS (comes off the shelf) implementations because it was better for them to purchase software than it was for them to write it.  Sure, you might ask, who would write a database software package?  I can’t tell you how many order entry or ERP applications I wrote over my career.  People customized Oracle Applications to no end in the early days.  Then we learned that practice was a bad idea – most of us learned the hard way.  I was on a project in the early 90s where the ERP customization had been in progress for years.  When the next version of Oracle Apps came out, “customizations” killed everyone. 

Now we’re service-oriented.  Someone recently said to me “this SOA thing isn’t anything new.”  That’s true, it’s really not – someone else summed it up very well – “SOA is really just a bunch of best practices of best practices.”  In other words, just because you put an SOA in place doesn’t mean you can’t screw it up.  In my early SOA efforts, governance (i.e. operational excellence) wasn’t discussed, so we learned those best practices the hard way.  SOA can easily put components of the architecture right into the heartbeat of a company.  I recently talked to one of our DBAs who mentioned that a customer had all of their services running through one DB box that was processing 3500 transactions per second…therefore , they could afford ZERO downtime.  That’s risky!  I’d venture to say that’s not a best practice.  And they are an SOA shop…

Service orientation gives you an open API to your business, data, and business processes.  Platform independent, technology independent…i.e. we’re not technology oriented any more…

SOA provides you with an open standard API to your entire business.  That’s service-orientation!

Technology-oriented (then)

·                     Traditional business applications – “one-size-fits-all”

·                     Business processes created to utilize technology

·                     “Re-engineering”

Service-oriented (now)

·                     Standard information and process “services” that can be mixed and matched to solve business problems in a standard, reliable, flexible and efficient way

·                     Technology created to serve business purposes

·                     Business Intelligence, Business Process Management

Benefits of Service-Oriented IT

The benefits of service orientation are real.  Imagine having an open standard API for your entire business.  Any system can communicate with any other system – transparently.  So rather than moving and copying data throughout your organization, you can get the data from the system of record (single source of the truth) when you need it.  Traditionally we have replicated data throughout our organizations.  Copies of data everywhere – i.e. stale data throughout.  I was at a government facility the other day and they said – “we have access to yesterday’s information, but not today’s.”  They are making decisions about people’s lives with day old data!

Do you want to invent the wheel?  Do you want to re-write your systems?  Of course not.  You have years of development in your existing business logic.  In fact, in many organizations the person who wrote the original code has been gone for 10 years now.  It’s a black box.  Or…you might have a packaged application (i.e. COTS) that you don’t have the source code for.  And nearly every COTS provider makes it clear that if you modify their source code, you won’t be supported.  They also make it clear that if you put data into their database without going through their APIs, you will not be supported. 

Well the good news is that unlike historical architectures that required a re-write to migrate to them, SOA allows you to re-use your existing data and business logic – i.e. wrap it.  This is a first!

This sounds like a great concept, but as you study SOA, you’ll quick say that you don’t want to expose everything you have today as a service – i.e. programs are too granular (i.e. fine grained) to be useful in their raw form.  Composite services allow you to combine services into a larger (i.e. course grain) service.  BPEL processes allow you to orchestrate services – i.e. put workflow around services – even granular services via RMI (which is fast).  The bottom line is that some people refer to the reuse of your existing logic as “Legacy modernization.”  Clearly this is efficiency for your organization.  The benefits of legacy moderation are that you’ll have no new spend for these services, no new training  is required ($, comfort, user error – i.e. you get to program in whatever core competency you have today); and it will meet your regulatory requirements.

If you implement a service orientation using Agile, you’re able to accommodate changes quickly!  If you remember programming 101, it’s best to make one change, then test it out fully rather than changing 20 things and trying to get your program to work.  Well SOA is the same way – rather than developing 20 services at once, you can use Agile with short iterations and releases. 

Wouldn’t it also be able to build services as you prioritize them – i.e. as the business is changing?  It’s similar to Just in Time (JIT) inventory.  This is Just in Time Web Services!

If you can put some predictability in your service orientation efforts, you’ll be able to ultimately reduce your risk.  It’s pretty simple really!  This strategy will position you for the recovery by building your corporate knowledge one service at a time…not literally one service per iteration, but you get the idea.  This provides for continuous improvement.  Services will be used and re-used!  This process encourages and support information sharing!

Reuse of assets is pretty cool and Agile makes it fast to see the results.

Consistency across enterprise

·                     Single source of truth

·                     Reuse and efficiency

·                     “Legacy modernization”

·                     Agile – accommodates change

·                     One vs. many access points

·                     Predictability -> reduce risk!

Position for the recovery by building corporate knowledge

·                     Continuous improvement based on multi-use

·                     Encourages and supports information sharing

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

There are a lot of components to a complete SOA stack.  The good news is that you don‘t have to build your entire stack day one!  You likely already have your computing and network components.  You likely already have your business applications.  SOA gets built around everything you have today – even the existing services.  SOA is an architecture, not a product you buy.  We have more information on the stack, building the stack, governance, and more…so if you‘re interested in learning more about the stack and how these things fit together, please send us an email or give us a call – we would be happy to talk to you more about this.

The good news is iPerspective either fits into an existing stack or we give you a complete stack…it‘s your call.

The SOA Train is Here!

Gartner has something they call the hype cycle.  It’s a cycle that they say every new technology goes through.  People get excited about new technology very quickly.  Take Twitter for example – I’m thinking it has to be at the top of the hype cycle – and will soon crash.  Once people get beyond the hype and get back to reality, the technology tends to hit a new low, then slowly rebuilds.  Depending on what part of the curve you’re comfortable implementing a new technology will depend on your interest in SOA or any other technology.   If you’re an early adaptor, you missed the curve for SOA…but cloud computing might be more up your alley right now.  SOA has passed the hype cycle and is into the safe zone.  So at this point you’re not an early adaptor – nor a late adaptor.  Just like Goldilocks said in the “3 Little Bears” said – “this bed is just right…”  You time might be now.

Internal sales – we’re past the early adaptor stage – it’s time for others now…

SOA Utilization

IDC took a look at services within organizations that were using SOA to figure out what categories their services fell into.  If we focus on a few service categories, we quickly notice that 58% of the services either wrap an existing interface, query or update data or perform data transformation.  We’re going to come back to our technology that supports our methodology in a minute, but the circled categories are easily created using iPerspective (our technology).  You’ll get to see more about this in a minute.

The circled ways companies are using services are what iPerspective does immediately.  It’s 58% of the picture out of the box.  We have other things like security services, we can do such as event notification, etc.

SOA Is Alive and Well!

The Burton group did a great job of exciting the SOA world and creating viral hype for the community by saying SOA is dead – brilliant!  But…it’s not dead.  Long live services – but monolithic, top-down, waterfall SOA projects…yes, those are dead.  Who can afford to wait 2 years to see the results of something you start today?  Nobody can.  The business changes far too much in 2 years.  In times like today, 2 months is too long!

As I discussed above, legacy modernization – i.e. using your existing assets is key.  There is a shortage of skills and talent within most every organization today.  Most adaptors of SOA said this was a challenge to support a HUGE SOA initiative.  Again, our technology that backs up our methodology, iPerspective, answers that challenge by automatically taking care of complexity and removing the need to know new programming languages and paradigms in order to exploit the advantages of SOA.

SOA is not dead, but as I mentioned above, SOA doesn’t give you ROI…and services are alive – just not the big stuff…

Monolithic, tops-down, waterfall approaches have not worked:

·                     Multi-year

·                     No significant ROI

·                     Cultural turmoil

Burton Group: SOA is dead!?

·                     According to Burton Group in 2008, SOA initiatives have stalled out in some cases:

o   The techies have not been able to explain to the business units why they should adopt a better attitude about sharing and collaboration — which is the fundamental cultural shift required for SOA to succeed. The pervasive attitude is “What’s in it for me?”

·                     No! Service-oriented is very much alive!!

·                     iPerspective automates and requires no new skills!

Comparison of SOA Approaches

The TUSC approach or methodology empowers rich customer interactions through Agile SOA

We believe that

·                     SOA should be delivered in days, not months or years.

·                     Agility is the ability to be flexible, quickly – this is critical in both your approach and technology benefits

·                     Simplicity and delivering rapid value are paramount

·                     There is a better way to deliver SOA Today.

·                     Traditional and technology-oriented approaches take too long, require the business to wait as it changes, lacks agility, etc.  Agile is by far the most productive development methodology I’ve ever experienced.  We use it for all of our internal product development.

Our approach is iterative, small projects, quick ROI…

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile, soa

I created a sample Oracle Application Express (ApEx) application that contains a few of the queries in the previous blog entry.  The application executes the 3 queries below.

Sample ApEx Application

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized apex, query from a web service

Imagine for a minute if you had the ability to write a query from a (Web) service.  I’m calling this “Service as a Query” or “Query from a Service” or “Query Service” for short…

For example, let’s say you wanted to write a query against a Web service from http://www.thomas-bayer.com/ that contains an operation called getBank.  The service contains a bank ID (biz).

select bankName, bankId, location, plz
from   thomas_bayer_bank_service
where biz = 20041133

Powerful, right?  Absolutely!  Or let’s say you want to query from http://www.abundanttech.com/ ”dead or alive” service and call the getTodaysBirthdays operation (that has no parameters):

select *
from   todays_birthdays

 

Or let’s say you used Yahoo Pipes to pull Oracle’s current stock price and then you want to query from a RESTful service to get this information - now:

select current_stock_price, link, details
from   yahoo_pipe_oracle

Or what if you want to query from Google:

select *
from   google
where  searchString = ‘Bradley D. Brown’

Web Services allow you to run a program on another server as if it’s on the same server.  You don’t need to know the operating system, the hardware platform, the programming language or much of anything about the source system.   You simply run the program on another server.  That’s what a Web Service is.  Just think about the power of being able to query from ANY data source as if that data is in your own database.  That’s what I’m calling a Query Service!

Rolta’s iPerspective product allows you quickly expose your existing business logic and data as Web Services.  As discussed below, iPerspective adds key features to your service deployment.  Rolta’s Periscope product gives you Query Service functionality right out of the box.  You can query from ANY Web Service with a simple SQL Query!  Imagine the power of this type of functionality.  Any product that uses a JDBC driver can now query from any Web Service as if the data is on the same system.  That’s powerful!

Here are some of the key iPerspective differentiators:

1. Federated (i.e. cross DB) queries

2. Security

   – i.e. if you want put a digest, LDAP, single sign-on layer on top of services – with a button click

3. All different bindings of the WSDL (i.e. old formats to new)
4. Release management - Grouping of objects into different releases of services
5. A repository of your services -
6.  i.e. a pretty complete stack all in one
7. Extended object support – we support a lot of things that JDev didn’t in the past – i.e. overloaded functions in a package, record types, and MANY, MANY ore –

   basically any Oracle ERP package/API can be turned into a service

8. Dynamic service - We have a service type that allows you to call it and pass in your SQL statement and we have security options that allow you to restrict what objects can be used and you can lock down the gateway or allow the service to accept this and you can pass in a federated query too
9. Virtual private service - ability to provide access to a service that gives a customer only their data
10. ApEx, Sensedia and UDDI support - We deploy our service repository to a number of other repositories
11. RESTful services - with a click, you can make your release a RESTful release
12. Auto deployment - we can deploy to 1 server or 100 at once
13. Open Adaptor API – we have an open API for Security, Gateways. Code generation

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized Query from a Servicer, Query Service

I’ve read some people’s comments about Google Fusion Tables and how it might compare to an Access DB or to Microsoft Excel, but not to a “real” database like Oracle.  Today, maybe, but tomorrow (or soon) - I think not! 

Google is quickly moving into cloud computing - if they aren’t there already.  They are a company of sheer brilliance - extremely calculated, extremely smart moves and highly respected amoungst technologist.  Sure, there’s plenty missing now - like the ability to write a SQL query and transform your data, an SOAP/REST API or JDBC driver, customization features (i.e. add your own visualization), a procedural language and much, much more.  But Google moves fast - VERY fast.

Check out the visualizatoin features for example - these are impressive and SUPER easy to use.  I’m confident more and more of those will appear shortly.  When Google adds extensible functions to their database, again - watch out.  Yes, as of right now, it’s a repository of data that can be shared - big deal, right?  A glorified spreadsheet - sure.  But that’s today…not tomorrow, not a year from now.

What would I like to see added right now?  The SOAP or RESTful API that I mentioned above.  A JDBC driver would be a dream come true for me - why?   Because our iPerspective product can turn the JDBC driver into a series of Web Services for the application.  I really like how Zoho approached their Cloud DB offering.  In fact, I really like how they offers applications (like a CRM package, Office-like software, Invoicing, Projects, etc.) on top of their database.  What if you could build and offer applications on their DB?  What if Google came up with applications (i.e. an ERP) on top of their DB?  Sounds pretty powerful to me!

Right now it’s just a glorified / enhanced Excel spreadsheet, sure…but watch - that will change!

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized google fusion tables, oracle, soa, sql

It’s been said that IT departments will become extinct - just as having your own power plant became extinct for large corporations.  When I started my first job, we had a HUGE dictation department.  Clearly that department became extinct as word processing rolled out to the sales reps, executives, and the C-level teams.  Utility computing promises the same future for internal IT departments.  Why do companies have IT departments?  IT isn’t typically “core” to an organization.  Sure, some parts of IT are - the information part, but not the “data” part.  There are far too many things that IT departments do that could be done MUCH better in scale. 

To move our systems outside our companies is a multi-step process.  One step that will help us make great progress toward utility computing is cloud computing.  If you want to move into cloud computing, you MUST start with SOA.  If you want your systems to be able to talk to each other, you must start with SOA.  If you want your customers to be able to talk to your applications, you must start with SOA.  If you want your vendors to talk to your applications, you must start with SOA.  Operational efficiency begins with SOA too!  SOA begins with services.  Thinking in service orientation is a fundamental start to it all.

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized

Today’s an exciting day for the iPerpective team - it’s launch day! 

• Exciting News
• E-Biz
• Search SOA Article

Bradley D. Brown Uncategorized

As I look into the future of SOA and WOA, numerous applications are still waiting for you to build them. If you’re looking for an opportunity to innovate and build a SaaS or Cloud offering for the world, I’d recommend you think about a SOA / WOA application that communicates with everything else in the world. Today this is SO easy to do too!

When I started studying the static pages of the Web in 1994, I immediately saw an opportunity to build pages dynamically. Originally this was called CGI programming. I immediately started developing dynamic Web applications and talked about how this was going to change the world. That people were actually going to build “Transactive Content” applications and that people would make millions doing so. Amazon is a great case-in-point.

After developing my first Web applications, I needed data from other Web applications, so I turned to scraping HTML data, turning it into XML and getting my needed data from other sites. At that point, I knew that system-to-system integration and sharing of data was going to become important to our future…which clearly it was.

I began talking about dynamic XML, which quickly evolved into Web Services as we know them today. SOAP (i.e. SOA) is sometimes a little heavier than “need be” so RESTful services (i.e. WOA) is ideal for AJAX-based client applications and the like.

When I started talking about Web Services (in about 2003), I discussed a number of applications that could be built that could revolutionize the world as we know it. Companies like Facebook have capitalized on the concepts I’ve been discussing for years now.

As I mentioned, building applications that talk to other applications is so simple today. Products like Rolta TUSC’s iPerspective make it easy to expose your existing data and business logic as SOAP Web Services or RESTful Web Services. Imagine the power of building an application and instantly being able to expose your entire application through an open standard API (i.e. Web Services).

The beauty of application-to-application integration is that if you build an application and connect it to the world, people can use your unique IP however they wish to use it. If you create a flexible or dynamic open API, your customers will be able to get the data they want, when they want it, how they want it. It also allows you to focus on your core skills and allow others to focus on their core skills.

So, stop, take some time to think about the application you’ve been dreaming of…it’s possible today! The application that I talked about some years ago Orbitz has capitalized on - booking flights, hotel, cars, all on one system. I took it a few steps further in my presentations in 2003, but for intensive purposes - they have an application that does a lot. But not this far. Imagine if you built this 2003…why not build it today? I’ll use it!

Imagine this…

Let’s say you want to build an integrated travel and scheduling application. As I mentioned, there are plenty of travel companies out there already. There are also plenty of scheduling applications as well.

Here’s a use case. Let’s say that I’d like to make a business trip to TUSC’s Chicago office. I would need to book a flight, rent a car, book hotel(s), and then I’d like to make appointments with “key” customers.

As you know, you can arrange the flight, car and hotel through one service (e.g. Orbitz)…so where’s the value? Well…what about the “rules” of your travel? How about “scheduling” your days of the trip?

Imagine an application where using your online assistant, you could begin by defining the initial rules for your travel preferences. Your “assistant” is external to your company of course. Let’s say that I would like to make the trip in the next month and I would like to spend the least number of days possible (2 minimum to 4 maximum) and visit the most customers possible. The application allows me to predefine numerous rules in my profile - just like you would communicate to your assistant.

Rules such as detailed hotel, airline and car rental preferences, how long a customer visit takes on average (e.g. 2-3 hours), meeting invitation / letter to customers and prospects, spend the least amount of time in a city possible, arrange appointments around dates that offer the least amount of money on flights, hotel and car rental possible, start as early as 6am and end as late as midnight and so on. Again - this is what my assistant already knows about me - so why not automate these rules?

Now - what about those key customers? As you know, your hosted / SaaS CRM application already contains this information. You might also need data from your ERP application to determine “key” customers. But in an open API world, it’s very easy for us to integrate all of these applications. In my rules, I might define that “key” customers should be ranked by revenue or longevity or whatever criteria I wish to use for this trip.

Using my integrated application, calendar invitations (this is an open standard today) are automatically sent to customers and prospects. Customers then accept (or reject) the invitations - which are not for a specific date - just “will they meet with me for 2-3 hours?”

After this initial invitation is sent, 8 people accept my offer. We know the address of each of our customers, so schedules are calculated based on drive time, 2-3 hour meeting time, availability of people, etc. It turns out that in the next 4 weeks, only 2 of the weeks will work based on everyone’s schedules – the block of time required (3 days – M-W, T-R, W-F)
Flight, hotel and car rates for the available blocks of dates are gathered based on preferences and wala, a trip date is selected! All automatically!!!

Everyone’s calendars are updated (my calendar, my wife’s calendar, my assistant, the 8 appointments and the people they want at the meeting). The reservations are booked - including the hotel (2 different hotels), car, and airline.

As the trip date approaches, schedules are automatically adjusted and confirmations are sent at key points in the process (based on people’s profiles).

My iPhone contains all of his travel information of course. When I arrive in Chicago and pick up my Hertz Gold service, my car’s NeverLost is loaded with each address for the day. Traffic information is also communicated to select the fastest route to my destinations. As I drive to my first customer visit, On the way, I’m read (i.e. text to speech) updates about the customer – recent transactions with customer, problems, emails, etc.

My hotel for the evening required no cancellation fee and a last minute rate became available. The hotel changed on the fly. My iPhone calendar is updated and car directions are updated. My spouse and assistant were notified of change too.

As can be expected, one customer cancelled, so a new prospect was invited and accepted – everything was updated once again. When any meetings are finished early the car noticed, customers were contacted to move appointments up when possible.

At the end of my trip, I ended up finishing the 3 day trip 4 hours early, so my flight was automatically changed to standby for the earlier flight. I got home 4 hours earlier than I originally planned, which my wife knew about because she was kept up-to-date by my “assistant.”

Is this dreaming? In 2003 people thought I was dreaming when I explained that all of this is possible with Web Services. Today it’s absolutely considerably easier than it was then.

My point? Dream - think of an application and build it! Don’t re-invent the wheel. There’s no need to do so now that SOA and WOA can help you integrate what already exists. Build an integration platform…why not?

Bradley D. Brown ajax, collaboration, rest, soa Insights SOA WOA iPerspective TUSC SaaS Cloud