"SOA-compliant" sounds like BS to me, but I still agree with Todd's
point that assessing vendor's SOA capabilities is a good idea. To me,
the critical question is not what services a packaged application
_provides_ - that's easy to do by wrapping an existing API in angle
brackets (bad services with the wrong granularity, you can say --
but still, arguably, services). The critical question is what
services the vendor _consumes_ - i.e. can I make it call my partner
service instead of replicating my data into its data store.
Stefan
--
Stefan Tilkov, http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/
On Jun 27, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Todd Biske wrote:
I don't think it's a meaningless phrase. I actually think it's
extremely important to evaluate how well third party products,
whether purchased via a hosted or shrink-wrapped model, play within
an enterprise's SOA. While I'll admit that it can be very
integration-centric, it should be a red flag if a company can't
adequately describe their solutions in terms of the services they
provide and how they contribute to their customer's SOA. Simply
stating they have web services or REST interfaces doesn't cut it
though. I'm much more interested in the functions the services
provide than necessarily how they're exposed.
Take, for example, something like SAP. Merely stating that thousands
of APIs are now available as Web Services really doesn't mean much
from an SOA adoption standpoint. Yes, it may be an indicator of
reduction integration costs, but in terms of the impact to an SOA
effort, you have to ask the question on whether the functional
decomposition chosen by SAP matches the business domain models of the
enterprise. Coming back to my horizontal versus vertical theme (see:
http://www.biske.com/blog/?p=186), if the things the enterprise wants
as "horizontal" doesn't match up with things SAP has made
"horizontal," the effort will be painful. If the vendor can't even
provide a view that allows you to perform this type of evaluation,
you'd have to ask whether or not they really understand the business
domains in which their products participate. It's probably far more
likely that the enterprises don't have the proper models and
resources to do the evaluation, and therefore get stuck with whatever
the vendors provided. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but
it's basically anyone's guess, because the enterprise hasn't done the
work to make good decisions.
-tb
On Jun 27, 2007, at 10:30 AM, Teresa Jones wrote:
> I'm currently looking at a CRM product that the vendor claims is
> 'SOA-compliant' yet it is also claimed to be an n-tier
architecture. A
> quick search on the concept of SOA-compliance brought up this
> article:-
> http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/engineering/archives/my-soa-
> compliant-toaster-and-cell-phone-7362
> which was quite fun!
> I suspect that the CRM vendor concerned actually means that you can
> integrate with it using web services....
> Question for the group - can an application be regarded as
> SOA-compliant? Or is that rather a meaningless phrase?
> thanks
> Teresa
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
