As virtualization becomes more widely deployed and enterprises look for new ways to leverage this revolutionary technology, says Citrix CTO Simon Crosby (pictured) the consumption and delivery of this technology is changing. Crosby will be expounding on this theme in a breakout session...

I recently had the less-than-entertaining experience of a series of emails exchanged with a customer (manager level) on how to measure the “perceived user experience of throughput” through one of our nodes in their network. Since this node is one of many – very many &...

Over the last couple of years I have been focused on identifying sustainable business models for communication service providers. As part of this analysis I have investigated the return on invested capital (ROIC) as a ratio of weighted average cost of capital (WACC) for a variety of se...

IT personnel have been referred to as many things:from heroes and essential partners, to %^&**!@#!! villains. But how about a Pit Bull or a Chihuahua? If you take a look at some of the most dramatic canine personalities, you might find some interesting similarities between engineers ...

Healthcare leaders in the US have agreed to meet in California at the end of September at The Next Generation Healthcare Summit, to discuss the future of their businesses and the healthcare system. Media coverage across the globe has detailed both negative and positive opinions, and ye...

The enterprise architect role is in flux, especially as we consider the heightening interest in cloud computing. The down economy has also focused IT spending to seek out faster, better, and cheaper means to acquire and manage IT functions and business processes.

Over the past two years, governments around the world have caught the enterprise architecture and SOA fever. This is especially the case in the US Federal Government, where a number of regulations, EA frameworks, and major spending initiatives are all pointing towards continued and las...

iTKO says HP is going to resell its LISA Virtualize software combined with HP’s quality management, functional and performance testing solutions. It’s supposed to accelerate software testing and reduce the cost of developing increasingly complex modern applications. What LISA does is d...

Whether you are a project manager planning for a smooth implementation of a plan or a project sponsor on whose decisions a project depends, you cannot escape from the fact that project estimation is essential to its success. In the first place, there are three basic requirements that a...

There’s nothing more that architects love to do than argue about definitions. If you ever find yourself with idle time in a room of architects, try asking for a definition of “Service” or “architecture” and see what sort of creative melee you can start. That being said, definitions are...

Now that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is finally becoming mainstream, an increasing number of people are asking us what comes after SOA. If SOA is one step in the evolution of distributed computing, the reasoning goes, then something is bound to be next in line. Furthermore, jus...

People often describe the act of changing focus from one related but distinct task to another as “wearing two different hats.” Like moving from “developer” to “administrator” when you’re trying to deploy an application in a testing environment. You’re the developer, but then you have t...

Recorded live at the 15th International SOA World in New York, NY, this interview between Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan and industry analyst Anne Thomas Manes shows Manes on top form. They discuss among other things her controversial "SOA Is Dead" essay.

My first read through a post on the Cloud Front Office led me to scoff disdainfully at the re-emergence of a concept central to a successful SOA implementation: the service catalog. Oh, we called it "registry" and then "registry/repository (reg/rep)" and finally "governance" but the co...

ZapThink considers the SOA business case as an essential SOA artifact. Architects must have a clear picture of the business motivations for SOA, not only at the beginning of the initiative, but also as the architecture rolls out. Nevertheless, there is still frequently a disconnect bet...

"Historically, the architect has been the coordinator of all other disciplines involved in the building process. According to training and licensing exams, architects must be able to integrate all building disciplines to protect the overall health, safety, and welfare of a project. W...

Loose coupling presents architectural challenges that are at the heart of planning and implementing the SOA infrastructure. Building the Service abstraction presents a simplified representation to the business but requires additional efforts under the covers to make that abstraction a ...

Who says there are no second acts in life? After having caught its breadth with the webMethods acquisition almost exactly two years ago, Software AG has struck again with an offer to buy roughly half the shares of IDS Scheer from the company’s founders. The offer, worth roughly $320 mi...

Ever since ZapThink coined the term "Service Oriented Integration" (SOI) back in 2002, there's been unceasing confusion on just how Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and integration relate to one another. Several recent blog posts have refocused attention on this confusion, including...

The Gartner Group just listed "9 ways to measure SOA success.” Not to take anything away from Gartner, but theirs is a pretty basic list, if you ask me. Indeed, these nine measurements are really about any successful architecture, using SOA approaches or not, which is fine. However, I...

With the spoils of the BEA acquisition now fully baked into the mix -- and with anticipation for what the pending Sun Microsystems buy brings -- Oracle is well on its way to obviating the middleware moniker. Perhaps we should call it "anyware."

This is a blog about the importance of cloud solutions that are organized as services. As more and more cloud computing offerings hit the market, I think it is becoming increasingly important that users understand what to look for in such solutions. It is one thing to provide something...

The deconstructed, loosely coupled yet unified musical principles of Anton Webern about a century ago bear an eerie resemblance to what SOA practictioners are doing today with enterprise IT.

Our panel of IT analysts discusses the emerging requirements for a new and larger definition of governance. Any meaningful move to cloud-computing adoption, certainly that which aligns and coexists with existing enterprise IT, will need to have such total governance in place.

There’s no shortage of opinions on how cloud computing and SOA are related. Just plug the phrase into your favorite search engine and you’ll have a day’s worth of reading. What you are likely to find are articles discussing how SOA led to cloud computing, how a good SOA is a prerequisi...

With all the talk of cloud computing with in the U.S. Federal Government lately, it seems to be rubbing off on other governments around the globe. I've recently had conversations with the Canadian, US, UK, UN, and EU governments asking about how they might be able to investigate the cr...

Three years ago I bought a house in the south of Italy and since then I have been trying to immerse myself in the local culture. It recently occurred to me that there was a great deal of similarity between the nuances and national characteristics of Italy and the challenges faced by se...

We’ve been having quite a few discussions with analysts over the past few months on the subject of “cloud”. The interesting thing about these discussions is the vast array of points of view from which those analysts are viewing “cloud”. Some are focused on the network aspects, others o...

A couple of weeks ago, I was offered a chance to meet Mr. Vivek Kundra at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in downtown Washington, DC. Needless to say, I was honored to be given the opportunity. Although I was clear on my own views of how the Federal government could use cloud ...

There are several challenges when attempting a data center move or even just consolidation. Availability is the number one priority. All the systems during the move need to be available so production operations are not interrupted. Depending on the technology you use some solutions wil...

A few days ago I blogged about suppressing the SOAP fault detail Java stack trace on WebLogic Server when using the JAX-WS @SchemaValidation annotation for your web services. One of the problems with the @SchemaValidation annotation is dependent on the error in your incoming SOAP paylo...

The terrifying economy is disrupting our thinking about SOA and all its related technologies. It's hard to concentrate, but we should. This will end sometime... won't it?

Here we go again. While the paint is still wet on this new Web 2.0 stuff, many SOA vendors and large analysts firms are calling their market SOA 2.0. It's one of the silliest things I've heard in a long while, and both the analysts and vendors who use this term should be ashamed of the...

According to the Burton Group, the issues around SOA are not so much about technology and complexity as they are about the people and the processes within an enterprise. Indeed, in a recent article by Jon Brodkin, some of these issues are highlighted. The core issue is that IT thinks t...

While SOA has traditionally had something of a data obsession. While the focus has been on service-enablement of structured and transactional data and processes, documents and document-centric processes have been conspicuously absent from the SOA agenda. With structured data in order, ...

If you read this column and listen to my podcasts, you know that I call SOA what SOA is - an architectural pattern. In many instances, SOA is a vital component of healthy enterprise architecture. Indeed, I've provided some keynote talks around this very topic at about half-a-dozen ente...

As companies continue the pursuit of reaping the cost savings and productivity enhancements offered by integrating real-time voice traffic over the corporate Wide Area Network (WAN), unified communications (UC) has found an unlikely ally: service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Some of us are ready for the Web 2.0 wave that is now breaking over us, and some of us are not. The McKinsey Quarterly just put out an insightful article, 'Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch' (registration required), that outlines eight unique business trends that will be enable...

This morning I received a message from TechTarget telling me that SearchWebServices.com is renaming itself to SearchSOA.com. According to TechTarget the move is in line with a shift of attitudes and efforts within the application development community. As I've written many times, SOA i...

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is cr...