LiteBytes from Lustratus Research

SOA success, and what causes it

I was recently pointed to an articlein Mainframe Executive magazine written by David Linthicum on the subject of "Mainframe SOA: When SOA Works/When SOA fails". I think the friend who suggested I read it was making mischief, knowing my views on the subject of SOA and guessing (correctly) that this article would wind me up.

In summary, the article says that SOA is a large and complex change to your core architecture and working practices and procedures, and that the success or failure is dictated by questions such as executive buy-in/resourcing/funding/skills, and not technology selection.

"The truth about success with SOA is that it has little to do with the technology you want to drag into the enterprise to make SOA work, and more to do with the commitment to the architectural changes that need to occur"

I have two problems with the opinions stated in this article. The first is to do with changing attitudes to SOA, and the second with the technology comments. 

Let me first state that I am well aware that if a company wants to adopt an enterprise-wide SOA strategy designed to take maximum long-term benefit from this new way of leveraging IT investments, then this requires all ofthe areas brought up in the article to be addressed - skills, management buy-in, political will, funding and a strategic vision coupled with a tactical roadmap. I have no beef with any of this.

But I would contend that the world has changed from two years ago. The financial constraints all companies are experiencing have more or less forced the long-term strategic play onto the back burner for many. Some analysts actually like to claim that SOA is dead, a statement designed to be controversial enough to gain attention but to some extent grounded in the fact that a lot of companies are pulling back from the popular SOA-based business transformation strategies of the past. In fact, SOA is absolutely not dead, but it has changed. Companies are using SOA principles to implement more tactical projects designed to deliver immediate benefits, with the vague thought of one day pulling these projects together under a wider strategic, enterprise-wide SOA banner. 

So, as an example, today a company might look at a particular business service such as 'Create Customer', or 'Generate Invoice', and decide to replace the 27 versions of the service that exist in its silos today with a single shared service. The company might decide to use SOA principles and tools to achieve this, but the planning horizon is definitely on the short term - deliver a new level of functionality that will benefit all users, and help to reduce ongoing cost of ownership. While it would have been valid a few years ago to counsel this company to deliver this as part of an overarching shift to an SOA-oriented style of operations, today most companies will say that although this sounds sensible, current circumstances dictate that focus must remain on the near term.

The other issue I have with this article is the suggestion that SOA success is little to do with the technology choice. Given that the topic here was not just SOA but mainframe SOA, I take particular exception to this. There are a wide range of SOA tools available, but in the mainframe arena the quality and coverage of the tools vary widely. For example, although many SOA tools claim mainframe support, this may in actuality simply be anMQ adapter 'for getting at the mainframe'. Anyone taking this route is more than likely to fail with SOA, regardless of how well it has taken on the non-technical issues of SOA. Even for those SOA tools with specific mainframe support, some of these offer environments alien to mainframe developers, thereby causing considerable problems in terms of skills utilization. It is critical that whatever technology IS chosen, itcan be used by CICS or IMS-knowledgable folk as well as just disributed specialists. Then there is the question of how intuitive the tools are. Retraining costs can destroy an SOA project before it even gets going.

For anyone interested, there is a free Lustratus report on selecting mainframe SOA tools available from the Lustratus store. However, I can assure companies that, particularly for mainframe SOA, technology selection absolutely IS a key factor for success, and that while all the other transformational aspects of SOA are indeed key to longer term, enterprise-wide SOA there are still benefits to be gained with a more short-term view that is more appropriate in today's economic climate.

Steve      

Is the time right for Progress Software to be bought?

In the course of my ongoing analysis of software infrastructure vendors, I was intrigued by the recent earnings release from Progress Software, and it caused me to dig a bit deeper. Basically, Progress is holding its revenue stream although not growing it, and I guess in today's environment that is OK. But when the performance of the company over the last few years is considered, a different picture starts to build up.

Basically, Progress made a lot of money from its OpenEdge database product, and this business is still providing a rich 'cash-cow' revenue stream. However, not only has this stagnated but it is starting to decay, with Q109 showing a sharp drop. Admittedly this is probably in part due to currency movements, but the trend is clear - this is not a growing business ans the writing is on the wall, at least in the longer term. Progress knows this, and so over the past few years it has been on the acquisition trail, trying desperately to find a new business that can grow sufficiently to become the new OpenEdge. It has tried the area of Data, with its DataDirect division growing through acquisition, but this business has reached a steady state with little or no growth. It tried the area of messaging, being the company that brought the term ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) to the world through its SONIC line of business, but having got a great mindshare and market position it lost focus and this business is now fatally damaged, with others such as IBM, Oracle andMicrosoft taking up the mantle. Recently it acquired the APAMA complex event processing business, Actional (SOA management) and IONA (a datedintegration business based in Ireland). It has since found some success with the excellent APAMA offering in the heartland of financial market data processing, but has struggled to replicate this success in other industries and use cases. Actional has also had some success but it is immutably tied to the SOA star which is having its own problems. And IONA, similarly to Progress, has a nice legacy integration business based around Orbix but has failed utterly over the years to create anything else worthwhile.

The result is that although the IONA purchase has increased revenues in the Progress 'integration infrastructure' business unit, this is likely to be a one-off improvement and once again Progress is going to be stuck with an aging cash-cow and no clear rising star to take over responsibility for driving growth.

This might seem a recipe for Progress itself to be acquired. Up to now, this has been unattractive due to the share price, but in thecurrent climate the acquisition looks a lot more interesting. My view is that there are probably two strong candidate acquirers for Progress: 

• Companies looking for attractive maintenance businesses where profit can be maximized by cutting expenses and taking the money until the product line sunsets

• Companies not currently in the integration space but wanting to get into this lucrative area and looking for a ready-made product set (perhaps to underpin a professional services business)

Who knows what will happen in the current turmoil? I may be way off the mark, but if I was a company fitting either of these two categories, and I had the money, I think now would be a good time to strike. After so many false dawns, I suspect the Progress management team might not resist too hard....

Steve

  

What use is technology without flexibility?

I was reading a post today from mainframe integration vendor GT Software about its support of IBM's mainframe speciality engines, and I was suddenly hit by the realization that in order to really add value for users, technology almost always has to be accompanied by flexibility. The two need to go hand in hand if returns are to be maximized and business risk minimized. 

The specific example discussed relates to an IBM mainframe invention called a speciality engine. For the uninitiated, think of a logical processing box within the overall mainframe environment where processing is much cheaper, with different boxes being aligned to specific activities such as running LINUX operations, data access or Java-type activities. What this basically means is that if part of your workload is doing something that is supported by one of the speciality engine types, then you can choose to run it more cheaply by moving it into this engine, and in fact this can often improve performance too.

This is neat technology, offering the opportunity to reduce costs and improve effectiveness, and various mainframe software suppliers have jumped on the opportunity this offers by moving eligible workloads onto these specaility engines. However, as with any new technology development, things are not quite as simple as they seem. In the IT industry there is a terrible tendency to jump for a new technology and push everything onto it, without appreciating the implications. But, in this example, as pointed out in the referenced post, 

"There are many use cases where it is much more efficient to NOT shift workload to a specialty engine.  Why -- because, there is overhead associated with moving workload"

This is typical with just about any new technology. It is great in SOME circumstances, but loses out in others. iPODs are great for listening to pop music, sounding little different to CDs and being very much more convenient, but try them on classical symphonies and you will wonder what has happened to the color and magic of the piece. The key is to use new technology for WHAT MAKES SENSE, as opposed to what is possible. There is another angle to this flexibility too. IT vendors often ignore the fact that users are not starting from a clean sheet of paper; they have existing investments and technologies that cannot just be written off. Therefore, it is important to have the flexibility to operate with whatever is in place rather than demand a specific new technology component. This is not a static need, but a dynamic one - it may be that a company might change its approach further down the line, and a rigid, inflexible technology implementation can cause terrible future headaches.  

While new technology may promise a lot, it is only when coupled with flexibility over which technologies to use, for what, and when that technology can REALLY deliver its full value.    

Message-driven SOA - what goes around?

Starting from when I was running IBM's MQSeries business, in the 1990s, I learnt a big lesson about seeing things from the user point of view. We had a great messaging product, and it started the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) market rolling. Soon, vendors were pitching the wonders of business integration through an all-encompassing EAI framework....and users started moaning about it being complicated and too hard. Vendors brushed off these concerns and just shouted louder, and I was an evangelist in this....and then I started actually listening to users. I remember pitching for all I was worth on the strategic value of EAI, and then a user saying to me, "Steve, we believe you. But we can't get there in one jump - at the moment, what we really need is to hook this application up with that one, that's all".

For a moment my strategic eye was offended. How could you take this wonderful, clever, strategic software and then just hook two applications together? What a waste! But of course, I then learnt the practicalities of life, and the imperative to focus on the business need. If the business needs Application A to talk to Application B, then that is what it will fund, and that is what it wants to achieve. Sweeping frameworks are all very well, but for most companies practical considerations come first.

Now I am having deja vu, all over again. I believe in SOA - I am an evangelist. I can see the huge benefits it promises as a strategic platform for business agility, business visibility and cost-efficiency. And yet, talking to users it has finally sunk in that while some of the more lucky companies have the funding and resources to go the whole hog with SOA, there are a large number of users who 'just want to link A to B', but want to do so in a way that is consistent with a goal of enterprise-wide SOA some time in the future.

The new Lustratus report, free from the Lustratus web store, discusses a more tactical approach to SOA - "message-driven SOA". It points out that even for those companies who are terrified by the prospect of having to work out their process implementations and flows, change the way they work and deal with business transformation issues, there is a way to leverage SOA ideas in a tactical, simple way that is at least a step on the road to overall SOA adoption. Message-driven SOA is almost a reprise of the tactical use of messaging in the 1990s, but with an SOA spin on it. So, message-based flows loosely couple applications and programs together, delivering the benefits of business integration without necessarily having to get tangled up in full-scale process re-engineering and modelling. And yet, the reuse concept of SOA is also leveraged, together with the ability to expose these message-based integrations as SOA services.

Message-driven SOA may not be the answer to every problem. As a rule of thumb, it will be most attractive for integrations that are primarily of the application-to-application kind, where human interaction is limited and tasks are of short duration. But it is well worth a look to see if this simpler approach to getting tactical SOA benefits might be useful.

Steve   

Secure mainframe SOA-in-a-box

I was reading the announcement from Layer7 about its 'SOA-in-a-box' for IBM mainframe users, and a number of things struck me. First, I am SO PLEASED to see someone remembering that CICS is not the only mainframe transaction processing environment in use today. A significant number of large enterprises, particularly in the finance industry, use IBM's IMS transaction processing system instead. With the strength and penetration of CICS in mainframe enterprises, it sometimes seems like these users have become the forgotten tribe, but investments in IMS are still huge in anyone's numbers and it is a smart move to cater to them. I am sure that the fact that this solution serves IMS as well as CICS users will be a big plus.

The other point that struck me was that I have felt for some time that, with the security/intrusion detection/firewall/identity management market seeing such a shift to security appliances, it was time vendors thought of piggy-backing functionality onto these platforms. Of course, one reason for having an appliance is to provide a dedicated environment to address issues such as security, but in truth these appliances are rarely used to anywhere near capacity. Therefore it makes a lot of sense to optimize the use of the available processing power rather than slavishly locking it away where it can;t help anyone.

Finally, I have to admit my first reaction to this announcement was to worry about how good connectivity would be to the mainframe. Dealing with mainframes is an arcane area, and I was not aware that Layer7 had any special expertise or credentials here, but I see that GT Software is apparently providing the mainframe integration piece. This makes me a lot happier, since this company has been dealing with mainframes for 20 years. In fact, Lustratus did a review recently on GT Software's Ivory mainframe SOA tool, which is apparently what is included in the Layer7 box.

Anyway, on behalf of all those IMS users out there, thanks Layer7!

Steve

User experience with mainframe SOA provides interesting pointers

Yesterday, I had the pleasure to host an Integration Consortium webinar on the topic of mainframe SOA. The user experiences were provided by SunTrust, a major US bank, and I found them most illuminating.

One point that struck me was to do with ownership of the new services, from an organizational point of view. The issue here is that, although services representing mainframe transactions clearly fall into the domain of the mainframe programmer, the concepts of SOA and often the related tools can be quite alien to these programmers - having to worry about SOAP messages, XML, WSDL and web services standards for example. SunTrust cleverly selected a mainframe SOA toolset that masked much of this complexity, offering a development environment that COBOL programmers felt comfortable with. As a result, mainframe services are built and owned within the mainframe team, which is where they belong to be honest. To complete the picture, the tool transparently handles the service deployment, creating WSDL and exporting to UDDI registries as required, ensuring that SOA users will see familiar services.

The lesson seems to be, be clear on who you want to own what, and then choose a toolset that supports that decision. The alternative is a confused mishmash where no-one knows who is responsible for what.

Steve

Is your legacy integration just a veneer?

Summer seems to be a time for reading through that huge pile of interesting articles and magazines that you can only find time to look at on vacation. On flicking through my own mountain of stuff, I came across the Q2 edition of Financial-i, a magazine targeted at the Financial Services industry. One point to jump out at me was a comment from Paul Joynt of Nordea, a Scandinavian finance house.  Paul was pointing out that SOA does not necessarily solve the problems associated with legacy integration.

The article, 'SOA - is it worth the effort', is available from the Financial-i site if you register, but Paul comments that covering a legacy system with a wrapper "so it looks like what you want" still leaves problems with the next level of change, because "it's only a veneer".

I think Paul has hit on an important point here. Different vendors in the SOA space have different approaches to addressing the problem of integrating legacy systems. Some will simply 'hand off' the request for legacy information to a tool from the legacy supplier - in the case of IBM mainframes this might mean using WebSphereMQ as the bridge, for instance. Others might approach the problem in some sort of screen-scraping or other interface simulation approach, where the legacy application is fooled into thinking it is running in its normal mode of operations. Yet more may generate code-based wrappers for each individual need, to be executed whenever a particular service is required.

To me, this all sounds too much like veneer in Paul's terms. Although this might address immediate needs, future changes will continue to generate substantial additional work and the generation of more and more 'special-case' code and wrappers.

Instead, the best of breed legacy integration solution should embrace SOA and integration rather than try to fool it with wrappers designed to seal off the legacy world from the outside. Legacy integration should be about making the legacy system a full and active participant in the service definition and execution. For example, orchestration should be possible both outside and within the legacy environment. Services should be built with full participation from both sides. By taking this approach, the best of breed legacy integration tool will ensure that future changes will become easier, quicker, cheaper and more reliable.

For more information on the whole subject of legacy integration, specifically in the case of mainframe systems, Lustratus offers a free paper on the subject.

Steve