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Can SOA bring out Web services' potential?

• By Michael W. Bucken
• February 28, 2003

At its public coming-out party alongside Microsoft's original .NET pronouncement, Web services were talked of as a panacea for IT organizations (still) looking for a cheap means of integrating dissimilar systems.

Key buzzwords, like ''standards,'' ''integration'' and ''easy-to-use,'' accompanied the launch of the Web services phenomenon, prompting significant interest among IT operations and, thus, their suppliers of development and integration tools and technologies. Suddenly, we saw a slew of software suppliers promising tools to build, manage and deploy Web services. Books, magazines and trade shows were launched to explain the concept to IT development managers and engineers. High-tech firms from giants IBM and Microsoft to the smallest start-up professed support for the concept.

But now, as Jason Bloomberg points out in this month's cover story, ''Principles of SOA'' , the Web services honeymoon is over. It's time for the concept to deliver on its early promises. The pilot point-to-point integration projects are well underway and, for the most part, working pretty well. The standards issues are quickly resolving themselves and ample tools are emerging for Web services security and management.

Now, says Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, it's time to start creating broader Web services applications that extend further within and beyond the enterprise. A move to such complex applications won't be a simple one, says Bloomberg, as it requires the building of a new loosely coupled, standards-based Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), a significant challenge for IT development managers and teams.

In this story, Bloomberg explains the concept of SOA and how it differs from traditional software architectural approaches. The high-level framework for what Bloomberg calls the IT service-oriented architect can utilize Model-Driven Architecture and Agile Modeling concepts and tools to create and maintain a SOA. He also explains what's missing from the SOA concept today and how one can expect these holes to be filled.

Our hope is that Bloomberg can help you to determine how best to spend limited budgets during difficult times. To survive, organizations must continue to move ahead even with limited funds if executives and the rest of us hope to be ready to pounce when the good times return.

Meanwhile, regular contributor Colleen Frye takes a look at the status of the beleaguered world of B2B marketplaces and exchanges in ''B2B comes back on a smaller scale.'' Frye points out that the early B2B failures prompted a scaling back of the vision. Frye talks to some developers that have implemented successful small-scale B2B systems, and examines some of the plans for the future.

Best regards,
Michael W. Bucken