<<Eschewing the Gartner tendency for crystal ball gazing, Massimo Pezzini, vice president and distinguished analyst Gartner Inc., began that track session with a brief history of SOA. He noted that when he started working for Gartner in Europe in 1996, he was already going to IT departments with a paper outlining the principle of SOA. In many cases, he found he was evangelizing the converted.
"Customers were doing SOA then although they weren't calling it that," he told his audience. They tended to use the terms of the 1990s for their projects, calling them client/server. Pezzini said that is the secret few SOA gurus want to let out of the bag: SOA is an update of classic client/server. If developers were doing SOA 10 years ago, why is it considered the greatest thing since that anonymous baker began slicing bread before selling it? Pezzini said two things have made SOA the hot topic at analyst conferences. First, the development of common standards based on XML to help facilitate linking services in an application. Second, he said, "Now we know how to do it because of the pioneers from 10 years ago." He offered some wisdom gained from a decade of consulting with Gartner clients doing SOA. One of his first points was that for all the talk of the cost benefits of SOA and reuse, it is a hard sell at the executive level. Injecting a little humor, he did an imitation of a boss having listened to an IT manager explaining cost justification: "You're saying that if I give you $5 million today, it will save $10 million in three years. But if I don't give you $5 million, I can save $5 million now?" While most analysts, including Pezzini, recommend starting with small SOA projects and building incrementally, he said in reality "SOA is only cost justified in major applications" where there is the potential to save large amounts of money. However, since reuse is one of the ways to save money with SOA, he suggested following the example of Verizon Communications Inc. and form a "Service Chasing Team." He said Verizon has saved money by having a team of IT professionals dedicated to searching through the telco's large SOA infrastructure and identifying Web services that are ideal for reuse and then passing the information on to development teams. While the Service Chasing Team provides a carrot for reuse, he also recommended that organizations establish discipline and governance processes focused on avoiding the "wild" proliferation of services. "You will have to have a formal process for building Web services," he said. "You can't just have developers building services when they like.">> You can read this in full at: <http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1195357,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=556019> I am not quite sure why this should be considered such a stunning revelation - when you see the word "service" in a software context the word "client" does tend to pop up in one's mental processes. Perhaps certain people had not thought of it in client/server terms before because it is basically flat and not hierarchical like J2EE or .NET. By flat, I mean that a module can be simultaneously a server and a client. Delving further back into history, IBM's APPC/LU 6.2 was considered a peer-to-peer way for application modules on different different platforms(e.g. mainframes, AS/400s [now iSeries], PCs) to communicate. Again this could in effect be a flat client/server model as any such platform could be either client or server. Gervas ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Great things are happening at Yahoo! Groups. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/TISQkA/hOaOAA/yQLSAA/NhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> 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/
