Recently in SOA Category

IONA and Microsoft have a history. IONA has always recognized the value of Microsoft in the IT organizations of the worlds most successful corporations. Back when people were talking about COM Vs CORBA in the 90s, IONA recognized the opportunity to bridge both technologies. IONA understood that Microsoft dominated the desktop in large enterprises (OS/2 was still around but declining). IONA built COMet as a very successful COM/CORBA bridging technology. In my opinion that product helped both companies considerably. Today, as both companies roll out more SOA technologies and products, it is important for us to partner.

IONA continues to help bridge Microsoft based applicaitons and services with non-Microsoft based applications and services today with Artix and Artix Connect. IONA has been working to help integrate with Microsoft products such as Connected Services Framework (CSF) and Customer Care Framework (CCF) - see our Microsoft partner page for more details.

Of course there is also a lot of cooperative activity with Microsoft in the various WS-* standards bodies and working groups. And IONA has participated in interoperability events and plugfests to help ensure that our products interoperate. As new products from IONA and Microsoft come to market, IONA is making sure that we continue to interoperate and integrate with Microsoft.

Many of you know me as a Mac guy. Well I just got a new Dell to help me focus on some of my Microsoft activities. More on that later.

Is it because the so-called experts are wrong and the customers understand the problem better? Perhaps an academically sound approach just isn't needed in the real world and hubs will do just fine, thank you very much. (I believe there is a class of user this just can't scale too).

Is it because buyers are just plain uneducated or ignorant? I've come across many of these over the years. And I've come across system integrators that build out poor designs tha make distributed architectures look bad.

Is it because customers don't care? They're so burned out buying infrastructure that they've given up the fight? Let's face it they've gone through RPC, DCOM, CORBA, J2EE, .Net etc. and now they're faced with ESBs, JBI, SCA, WCF .....

Is it because hubs can make good sense for small to medium sized businesses and people can't differentiate between a small/medium sized problem and a big problem? The solutions must be different to scale and take care of issues such as transactions and other enterprise features. But, perhaps, it's just seems easier with a hub.

Is it because of perceived benefits of a hub like management? This is of course only a perception problem there are many technologies out there that allow for central management of a distributed architecture.

Hubs seem to have gravity and people get attracted to them. Unfortunately hubs can turn into black holes. Sucking in all that surrounds it into a dense mass from which nothing can escape.

Of course many customers are getting sick of hub based approaches and are not buying. They have enough infrastructure and plenty of hubs. Now they want to leverage that existing asset while a the same time taking advantage of SOA.

Companies like Microsoft, BEA, Sun Microsystems, IONA, SAP, Sonic Software, Nokia, IBM, Nortel, Adobe, webMethods, etc. invest lots of resources to these standards bodies (WS-Policy Participants) Some of the people are in several working groups and basically have built a career just working on standards,. And it is certainly not a cushy number. These people work hard on some very tedious material! It can do you head in!

I am an infant in this world. Though I have lots of enterprise computing experience and interoperability experience I feel like a complete novice. I'm fortunate to have landed with a very civil bunch who are gracious at bringing me up to speed.

Now there are many times that this sort of working group activity will do my head in. Bickering over the semantics of a word or the usage of a word or the absence of a word is not how I'd like to spend my day. But I've come to appreciate what can happen when ideas and standards are ambiguous. Chaos can ensue and perfectly good initiatives can die.

I'm hoping to pull post an article giving an overview of WS-Policy. Stay posted.

This week the WG had a face-to-face in Bellevue, Washington. I finally got to meet the people I've been talking to on conference calls every week for the last few months. We got to find out a little more about each other - not just our views on WS-Policy. Bellevue/Seattle was beautiful when I arrived but turned ugly from Wednesday. It was wet like Ireland. We did have a wonderful meal at the Seastar restaurant. I'd recommend it.