<<At this moment in time, how plugged into the mechanics of SOA are the folks at the executive level? Nash: The executives are much more focused at the level of do you want to build service-oriented architecture, are you going to use Web services to connect your partners? In terms of whether an appliance gets used here, the CTOs, maybe some CIOs, are starting to get into that picture, but at the moment they're thinking about these questions at a much higher level.
I think the interesting question for 2006 is where is operation control of SOA going to reside? I went to two customer sites over the last two days and I was surprised that the network operations people were not brought into what was a very large review of some products, because almost every other place I've ever been there was always one or two network ops people with the management folks that were in the room as part of the process of evaluating these products. What I see happening at the moment is this: Enterprises are still trying to work if this is a network ops kind of play, if it's a security-defined kind of role or is it sort of applications architects ownership, maybe applications operations that are going to own this. It's fairly distributed at the moment. What I think will happen in 2006 is there will be a realization that an operations group that crosses those boundaries needs to be created to deal with the various aspects of Web services. In some places they'll add application expertise to the network ops folks. In some places they'll go to the security folks and give them some operations people. Or it may be some amalgam where they create cross-functional groups. XML networking vendors can be hard to pin down. Some, like Reactivity, sell gear while others sell software. How does it all fit together? Nash: We're finding there's two ways you need to think about this problem. At the first level, there's the general purpose software or network agents running on a set of unique, special purpose [Application-Specific Integrated Circuits]. The second level that floats over that is a network appliance, or perhaps a better phrase would be a network intermediary, where we're talking about components that reside, architecturally, on the edge of the platform. What I often see happen is those two areas, for understandable reasons, tend to get mixed together. Let me deal with network agents. In that space what had been believed for a while, particularly with folks like DataPower, was that you needed to do something that looked a lot like the early days of routing hardware. In order to do that you needed to build special purpose hardware to address the problem. Yet any startup is going to be in a tough position to continue to innovate at a hardware level which would allow them to stay ahead of the kind of performance level you could get out of an Intel or an AMD. So rather than focus on hardware, let's focus on really smart algorithms and really effective ways to deal with caching and reuse of information and hang out for the Intel performance curve which is invariably going to come. In terms of smart algorithms we do a lot that's associated with caching. We actually cache knowledge about the fingerprints of the Web services messages we're seeing and we see within three or four similar messages we're only taking 10% of the time to process the message that it took us to process the first one. So we do things like cached SAML insertions and LDAP queries, which reduce the amount of network traffic that's going on.>> You can find this interview at: http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid26_gci1160420,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=540504 Gervas Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
