Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Call it a wish list, or call it predictions, here are my thoughts on SOA in 2007. Largely, I think we’ll see lots of movement in the operational management space, as you’ll see in my comments.

• Vendors: Surprise, surprise, the consolidation will continue. There aren’t too many niche SOA vendors left, and by the end of 2007 there will be fewer.
• Operational Management: At least one of the major Enterprise Systems Management providers will actually come out with a decent marketing effort around SOA management along with a product to back it up. As everyone knows, Systems Management is still the ugly stepchild that is far too often an afterthought, in my opinion. Systems Management technologies, however, are exactly what the doctored ordered for create a mature practice of Service Product Management (not Service Management in the ITIL sense, but a Product Manager for a Service). Without metrics, a product manager can’t hope to be successful. Without an appropriate metric collection and reporting infrastructure, the metrics won’t be available. Without this, there is no service lifecycle other than the service development lifecycle. The service goes into the production and the development team forgets about it until a red light turns on. That’s not the way to practice Service Product Management.
• Registry/Repository: At least one players in the CMDB space will enter into the Registry/Repository space, most likely through acquisition. There’s simply too much overlap for this not to occur.
• CMDB: At least one of the super-platform vendors will see the overlap between CMDB and Registry/Repository and begin to incorporate it into their offerings, either through partnership, or through an acquisition. Interestingly, I see this as a natural happening with efforts around the adaptive enterprise and closed loop governance. While virtualization and other technologies are allowing data centers to be consolidated, it’s still too static of a process with too much manual involvement. Get the metadata into a repository, collect metrics from run-time, run some analysis, and adapt as needed. Incorporate it earlier in the development lifecycle, utilizing testing results against base comparisons from production systems and we can shift into a predictive mode. This stuff is happening in research labs, but still hasn’t gained traction from a marketing perspective.
• Events: The importance of events has received some recent press, but unfortunately got mixed up in the awful marketing message of SOA 2.0 earlier in the year. I think we’ll see renewed interest in event description, as I see it as a critical tool for enabling agility. Services provide the functional aspect, but there needs to be a library of triggers for those functions. Those triggers are events. Along with this, the players in the Registry/Repository space will begin to market their ability to provide an event library just as they can provide a service library.
• Service Development and Hosting: Momentum’s CEO, Jeff Schneider, had predicted that the business process platform would become the accepted standard as the foundation for enterprise software in 2006. Well, that didn’t happen, but it’s still trending that way. Personally, I think we’ve lost sight of the importance of service containers, partially because of the confusion created by the ESB. While it’s too early to proclaim the application server dead in 2007, I think the pendulum will begin to swing away from flexibility (i.e. general purpose servers that host things written in Java or C#) and toward specialization. A specialized service container for orchestration can provide a development environment targeted for orchestration with an execution engine targeted for that purpose. The magic question is how many domains of engines will we need? Is it simply two- a general purpose application server for Java/C# code, and a model-driven process server for orchestration/integration, or are there more? If it is simply those two, I think we’ll definitely see less usage of the general purpose application server, and more usage of the model-driven process server.

So what are your predictions for the SOA space in 2007? From a wish list perspective, my wish for you is simple: success in your SOA endeavours! I know a great company that can help make sure that happens, as well!

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