News
Sun's Pragmatic Path to SOA
- By John K. Waters
- May 26, 2005
The watchword of Sun Microsystems' new specialized service-oriented architecture
practice is pragmatism.
"This whole SOA thing is going to be a journey," says Ashesh Badani,
Sun's group marketing manager for SOA. "You just can’t get it overnight.
Along the way, you want to adopt sensible development practices. You want to
focus on business challenges. And you want to bring legacy applications into
the SOA--this isn't a rip-and-replace process. That's what we call a pragmatic
view."
The new practice, called SOA Path, will offer four SOA services: SOA Jumpstart
Workshop, a program to assist customers as they execute an SOA; SOA Opportunity
Assessment, an analysis of key business processes and enterprise architecture
alignment; SOA Proof of Concept, for identifying and evaluating key candidate
projects; and SOA Center of Excellence, which Sun calls "a focal point
for reinforcing and promoting SOA recommended principles and reuse of current
processes, procedures, frameworks, standards and compliance.
Sun isn't the first vendor to offer SOA services. Both IBM and BEA Systems
offered much-publicized SOA support and services earlier this year. But Sun
doesn't think of itself as coming late to the SOA party.
"What we are late to is vendor hype," says Badani. "And we’re
glad about that."
What sets Sun's offering apart, Badani says, is its educational approach.
"Other vendors come in and set everything up for you, and never leave,"
he says. "But for us, this is about teaching these guys to fish, rather
than coming in and doing the fishing for them."
The practice won't involve long-term customer engagements, says Badani, but
briefer, less invasive interactions. The Jumpstart Workshop, for example, is
a two- to four-day, lightweight, onsite session designed to help customers define
their "SOA opportunities" and establish some starter projects.
"Our purpose is not to come into an enterprise and stay forever,"
Badani says. "We want to automate as much as possible and provide best
practices, and then get out of your way."
SOA Path focuses on products and services that support Sun's Java Enterprise
System platform, and are based on SOA and Web services standards running on
the Solaris 10 operating system. The JES includes the Java System Application
Platform Suite, a solution designed to address the use of Web services components
to integrate disparate enterprise systems; the Java Web Infrastructure Suite,
a quick-start approach to Web services; and the Java Identity Management Suite,
a set of ID management products.
Sun’s developer tools—Java Studio Enterprise 7 and Sun Java Studio
Creator—are also part of the package.
For more information, go to: www.sun.com/soa.
About the Author
John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Silicon Valley. He can be reached
at [email protected].