WebServices dot org

2005: A Year of Opportunity and Challenges Awaits the Industry

Listen to the prattle of the pundits, and you can be forgiven for thinking that we are on the verge of being overwhelmed by Service-Oriented Architecture deployments. The acronym SOA is on just about everybody’s lips – and press releases, and advertisements, and product brochures, and Websites. It seems that just about every vendor with code to sell – or analyst with a point to make – is now pushing the SOA concept.

Hype aside, there’s no question that we are moving into what is considered to be the next evolution of Web services, in which these services are loosely coupled into end-to-end implementations to cover more complete business flows and processes. Of course, many companies have just barely begun to get their feet wet in Web services, and are understandably confused about the SOA phenomenon. So while pundits may be calling 2005 the “Year of SOA,” we see 2005 more precisely as the “Year People Will be Talking A Lot About SOA.”

Before we get to the promised land of SOA, of course, there are some key necessities that must be considered and acted upon, including management and security. Most organizations, by nature, tend to be cautious and conservative in the may they deploy IT architectures, and no one will jump into SOA without a comprehensive plan and approach to ensuring that the Web services forming their SOAs are bulletproof, especially in terms of ensuring uptime, scalability, availability, security, and service levels. We’ve been down this road before; these are all issues end-user organizations wrestled with throughout the 1980s and 1990s as host-based glass-house computing evolved into client/server and then Web-based infrastructures. Over the coming year, we may not see actual SOAs coming on the scene, but we’ll see more organizations laying foundational management-level elements of Web services and SOA.

To get a more balanced and informed perspective on what 2005 will bring to the Web services and SOA market, WebServices.Org asked a number of industry visionaries to take a good, long gaze into the crystal ball and tell us what to expect. The following are some informed opinions on what 2005 will, and won’t, bring.

Ronan Bradley, CEO, PolarLake:

This Year Will be the Year of 'Mediation'

A lot of things won't change in 2005. Customers will remain focused on the requirements of business - delivering cost-effective and productive integration solutions. Successful integration vendors will be defined by how effectively they can address these issues. ESB and SOA vendors that can't move from selling technical architectures to selling business benefits will struggle.
That said, in 2005, we’ll certainly see an increasing acceptance of the SOA as a means to deliver enterprise integration and composite applications. Most large organizations are already deploying pilot projects, and we will see more widespread and enterprise-wide deployments. Because of that, we can also expect vendors to begin to address some of the crucially important integration difficulties that remain even after SOA adoption.

Whilst BPEL will be accepted as a standard solution to the 'orchestration' issue, the focus will shift to what BPEL is not. Although BPEL is being hyped by many vendors as the complete solution to integration, the orchestration it provides is is only half the story. Mediation - the translation between information models and data models, and the manipulation of documents and messages into the correct format for interaction with existing applications and infrastructure - remains the key challenge when integrating diverse systems.
On that basis, expect 'mediation' to become the hot topic of 2005. Until now most EAI and even ESB vendors have been happy to let customers 'solve' the mediation issue through mountains of custom-coding. That approach will not remain acceptable for long - aside from anything else it undermines all the promised benefits of the SOA -- incremental adoption, flexibility, and adaptability. Customers will be looking for products capable of handling both the orchestration and mediation of services running on multiple technologies - within the cost limits set by business.

Dan Foody, Chief Technology Officer, Actional:

In 2005, We’ll Separate SOA from Web Services

We’ve seen a number of companies that have SOA initiatives entirely separate from Web services initiatives. SOA purely is an architecture independent of the technologies that are deployed underneath of it. Web services is a tactical technology for solving certain kinds of problems, such as simple integration.

SOA is even a more complex form of what people have today; it is a connected environment with multiple connected tiers connecting across applications. Understanding where your transactions are flowing and where your problems are is a critical issue.

In 2005, people will focus on sharing services. There are a few that will build wide-scale, centralized architectures, but this will only begin in 2005. We’re going to see a lot more people pick a specific small number of services and use them as broadly as they can. You can just have a small number of services – two, three, or four – but if you’re reusing those broadly, I would count that as having a very effective SOA. We’re going to see a lot of that in 2005, which is a lot of small numbers of services broadly. For example, we have one customer that has 216 different internal consumers using one service.

Paul Lipton, Senior Architect and Strategist, Computer Associates:

In 2005, the Focus Will Shift to Management of SOA and Web Services

SOAs and Web services, by the very nature of the heterogeneity and interoperability that they promote, will usher in a new age where management, not platform, will be the key to success. There will be a broader understanding amongst architects and IT thought-leaders that SOAs truly need management if they are to live up to their promise and potential.

Gazing even deeper into the crystal ball, the diversity of Web services platforms in the enterprise will increase with every ESB, fabric, server, framework – or whatever you want to call it – claiming that it is the enterprise SOA infrastructure of choice. The truth will be that many enterprises will use multiple platforms, often from multiple vendors. No one vendor will have all the SOA platform answers. The heterogeneous nature of SOAs will create a world of interoperable, standards-based specialist platforms and that phenomenon will be more evident in 2005. It will also create the need for a broader management perspective that extends above and beyond that inherent SOA diversity providing some measure of visibility and control over what would otherwise be chaos.

David S. Linthicum, CTO, Grand Central Communications:

Value will Drive SOA Deployments in 2005

Today, you have to justify any changes to IT, and when building a SOA within your organization it’s pretty easy to define the value or savings, including reuse of code and services that save coding dollars and enable real-time inter-application communications. This makes business processes real-time; and enables orchestration and business process modeling – thus allowing inefficiencies to be eliminated. Enhanced security reduces the risk of volitions; and enhanced monitoring, thus allowing business to optimize in run-time. Dollar savings from a proper SOA strategy within a large organization, if designed and implemented correctly, could be a fifty percent reduction in cost over a five-year period. This good cost justification in my book.

Second, we will see the rise of true service-oriented approaches and technology and the fall of information-oriented approaches and technology. We’ve been focusing far too much on information-oriented technology recast as service, such as JMS-based messaging systems with service interfaces, and not enough on true service/behavior-based capacities that provide much more value. Service-oriented approaches focus on the capabilities or behavior of the participating applications or services – local or remote – as well as the information bound to those services or behaviors. Information-based technology may indeed leverage services, but only a mechanism to access information. . Thus, in 2005 we will learn to understand that ESBs have a place in a SOA, but are only part of a complete SOA solution, and in some cases may not be needed.

The year 2005 appears to be the year that architects, developers, analysts, and DBAs, get to the valuable work of building a strategic SOA. There is much to do with planning, architecture, as well as creating business cases for those that pay the bills. This is good work that will produce good results, and I can’t wait to see the efficiencies that we bring to IT in 2006.

Michael Liebow, Vice President of Web Services, IBM Global Services:

In 2005, SOA Will Be All About Business

IT departments introduced Web services into the enterprise mostly as a cost cutting measure and a means to do more with less. Because of the flexibility SOAs provide, and their ability to link directly to and execute business processes, business leaders will be pushing for the widespread adoption of SOAs in 2005.

SOAs are strategically centered at the intersection of business and technology, enabling enterprises to adapt quickly to changing environments. An SOA allows the IT department to keep pace with business imperatives as it automates business processes by abstracting the process from the underlying application and IT systems. This separation of automated process from IT creates enormous business flexibility, allowing business leaders to take greater control of how business is transacted within the enterprise and with partners, suppliers and customers.

The proprietary enterprise application integration (EAI) model as we know it is dead, and is giving way to SOAs that leverage Web services and other open standards. SOAs are helping to create a more flexible IT system that maps more closely with business processes and adapts to rapidly changing business conditions. We are at the beginning of this shift, and it will take some time to complete – but we have definitely started the transition.

Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA:

In 2005, the Real Action Will be in the Service Layer

We will see the market go past the early adopter stage in 2005. Innovation in software is likely to move up to the services layer. The lower layers – operating system, middleware, and programming language – already have sufficient features and functionality, and we are likely to only see refinements rather than significant enhancements there. The lower layers are in fact already commoditizing, a trend that will continue during 2005.

There is more attention being given to “industrializing” or automating software development. This is one of the biggest challenges for the software industry since it remains far too expensive to develop new software, and the quality is far too unreliable. The world’s economy – now so totally dependent upon computers – simply cannot sustain the current inefficiencies and high costs. Outsourcing is not the real answer, although it may be a part of the solution. This is a fascinating trend to watch.

Also, it looks like IT is moving away from developing new systems in favor of getting more out of existing systems – this is related to the services trend. If that's the case, it signals a change in the investment model for software vendors, since those "get more" projects don't justify as much expense as the "develop new" projects do. With vendor margins under pressure, that means R&D spend is under pressure - innovation seems likely to continue to move toward the Web services layer.

The application-as-a-platform trend at Amazon.com,eBay.com, Salesforce.com and others will continue. The public availability of services over the Internet represents the beginning of a major shift in how the industry will build software applications. During 2004 the ERP/CRM vendors all announced plans to service-enable their platforms, no doubt in response to Salesforce.com. Oracle recently confirmed that service enabling remains a future strategic direction for the PeopleSoft/Oracle Financials combination. But in the end enterprise applications will have to combine home-grown and hosted services to achieve all goals of IT – it will be the combination of internally developed services with hosted services that will give us the future. I expect this to become clearer in 2005.

Domain specific languages (DSL) will gain a lot of traction in 2005. The ideas just seem right, and UML has probably run its course. Sure, it’s great for whiteboarding, as many of the DSL bloggers have pointed out, and it did significantly advance the industry from the days in which we had half a dozen or more design notations to contend with, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for anything else.

Jack Quinnell, Chief Technical Officer, Kenai Systems:

Security will be On Our Minds in 2005

As businesses recognize the benefits of Service Oriented Architectures and embark on new Web services initiatives, they are realizing unprecedented productivity and efficiency gains. But with the benefits of SOA and Web services come substantial risks. As Web services continue to evolve from “basic” Web services to more complex business and mission-critical applications, integrating security mechanisms will become more essential to protecting a company¹s assets, customers, partners and entire IT ecosystem.

XML and other basic Web services technologies were developed without security in mind. They were designed for access, not security, Web services expose interfaces, IT topologies, business logic, and access to back-office systems. Web services traffic passes unfiltered through firewalls, giving hackers easy access to applications and data within the network perimeter. On the Internet itself, Web services traffic passes through insecure nodes where data can be intercepted, corrupted, or infected – quickly, repeatedly, and uncontrollably.

So far, no organization has reported an attack on its Web services. But security experts don¹t expect this calm to last. Just as hackers have preyed upon email, PDAs and now cell phones, they will strike at Web services. Criminals will find the easy access to financial transactions and personal data too tempting to resist. Then, as happened with viruses and worms, the attacks will become more sophisticated, more devious, and more damaging.

To reduce these security risks, businesses have begun deploying special security applications and appliances in Web services production environments. Developers will have to join in the effort if Web services are going to be secured systematically and cost-effectively. The question is how best to integrate security expertise and best practices in the development process, without jeopardizing the team’s productivity or needlessly complicating daily work. Development teams bogged down by security processes and unfamiliar, cumbersome tools are going to have a hard time keeping up with management¹s requests for new services and continual refinements. They need a solution for ensuring that code is secure and in compliance with industry standards and best practices. The solution should complement existing development environments and tools, enhancing, rather than thwarting, development processes as it makes Web services more secure.

Tim Ewald, SOA Best Practices, Mindreef:

We’ll Continue to Move Forward in 2005, With or Without Standards

While progress on standardizing WS-* continues, it doesn't seem possible that it would be complete by the time major vendors ship support – only WS-Security has completed the process and WS-Addressing may take a while. The standardization process is clearly important; it found enough issues that need resolution with SOAP, WS-Security, and WS-Addressing to prove its worth. WSDL 2.0 is the only major argument against the benefits of this process.

But like many pragmatists, I use software for the features it contains, rather than the standards it adheres to. That said, I'm wondering whether the WS-* stack will repeat the pattern of COM+ and J2EE, in which people invested a lot of time and money only to discover that basic technologies – like SOAP and WSDL – were all that they really needed. Amazon and eBay are enjoying financial success using basic Web services – or even XML over HTTP – making it harder to argue that you can't successfully reach your business goals without more advanced protocol support.

Corey Isaacson, CEO, Rogue Wave:

2005 Will be the Year We Ride the SOA Learning Curve

Also this year, the evolution to SOA – combined with general pressure on IT cost efficiencies and demand for results – will drive new ways of managing and deploying applications. Most notably is the convergence of inexpensive blade systems and distributed software capabilities into full-on business grid computing solutions. So far, many companies have experimented with grid for utility computing problems, which are long-running compute-intensive processes. But the evolution of grid technology for real-time business transactions has yet to be realized. Using grids for day-to-day business offers huge flexibility and potential cost savings, maximizing use of all IT resources across the enterprise.