deltalounge

According to research by the The Global Language Monitor:

SOA continues its reign as most confusing acronym

The Global Language Monitor is a company that collectively documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language usage worldwide, with a particular emphasis upon the English language. GLM is known for among others its list of High Tech buzzwords. Here is their top 5 of Tech Buzzwords of the Second Decade of the 21st century, thus far (2010, 2011 & 2012) everybody uses but don’t quite understand (with commentary):

1. Big Data — Big Data is the biggest buzzword. It has been called the key to new waves of productivity growth, essential to the US place in global economics, and more. Now if only we could agree on exactly what this means and how we get there. (By the way, consider yottabytes: a quadrillion gigabytes. Hint: Just think a lotta bytes.)
2. The Cloud — The Cloud, in various manifestations has been ranked No. 1 for 2008, No, 4 overall for the decade, and now as No. 2 for 2012. Still all very nebulous.
3. The Next Big Thing — A cliche rendered nearly meaningless by the innumerable daily claims made by VCs, entrepreneurs, college drop-outs, etc. Actually, you can count the history of next big things on your fingers, and possibly toes.
4. Social Discovery — Webster’s 1910 definition. “Consisting in union of mutual converse,” might be an excellent corporate strategy.
5. Web 2.0 (3.0, and so on) — Ranked as the 1,000,000th English-language word in 2009, it just keeps morphing along.

The Most Confusing Tech Acronym of 2012: SOA (Solutions Oriented Architecture), continuing its Most Confusing Tech Acronym of the Decade reign.

Watch the Mashable video on this list:

Read the full version on The Global Language Monitor.

And a little on SOA

Despite all the effort by numerous people this also shows that it is hard to get a solid grasp of what SOA is. We showed that before by comparing some of the definitions on (web) services and processes. We might learn from this that it is even harder to have as we call it “the business” initiate SOA projects and programs. Even if together with the business we get a clear picture of the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture is, it remains a challenge to lead them through this stuff they don’t really understand. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments…

The world’s largest conference dedicated to SOA, cloud computing and service technology will have it’s 2012 version in London! Hosting the 5th SOA Symposium and the 4th International Cloud Computing Symposium on September 24-25. This brings the symposium back to Europe after last years visit to Brasilia, Brazil. The SOA Symposiums website has been rebranded to Service Tech Symposium.

There are several blog posts on previous editions of the SOA Symposium available in blogs. During this years event the following books will be launched:

• Cloud Computing: Concepts & Technology
• SOA with REST: Principles, Patterns & Constraints
• Next Generation SOA: A Real-World Guide to Modern Service-Oriented Computing

Call for presentations

The 2012 program committee invites submissions on all topics related to SOA, cloud computing and service technologies. The primary tracks are:

• Cloud Computing Architecture & Patterns
• New SOA & Service-Orientation Practices & Models
• Service Modeling & Analysis Techniques
• Service Infrastructure & Virtualisation
• Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture
• Real World Case Studies
• Service Engineering & Service Programming Techniques
• Interactive Services & the Human Factor
• New REST & Web Services Tools & Techniques

Additional information the 2012 SOA Symposium Call for Papers are available online. Download the Speaker Form. All submissions must be reviewed no later than July 15, 2012.

Since this blog is also dedicated to sharing resources that are valueable to me I decided to share my reading list of 2011 with you.

Lean Integration: An Integration Factory Approach to Business Agility

A great best practices book on integration. The first part provides description of the business value of Lean. It introduces the core concepts. As a manager that doesn’t need all the details you could just read this part and you can get a good grasp of the ideas presented.

The second part translates the lean principles from the world of manufacturing to the world of systems integration. It has great case studies that shows the principles applied in a real world context.

Part three of the book provides a “how to” guide. This can be used as a reference and as such is a great desk-top reference manual. This book is great and a must read for all technology and business practitioners and innovators.

Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA

Great reference (not a book that I read front to back) on Web Service Design from Thomas Erl and his co-authors. This book focuses exclusively on the contract part of the service. Due to the depth it is a extensive resource to use besides others. The book is filled with extensive examples on how to meet the goals of SOA properly using contract design.

Via the site of the publisher and on iTunes are additional service design podcasts by the authors of the book. Could be a great resource to start with.

The Back of the Napkin (Expanded Edition): Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

This is a great book on problem solving, extremely useful and in a sense thought provoking. It structures problem-solving into a six by five visual codex. This makes sense; you can literally see the evolution of the thought processes and the development of the insights take shape through the pages. Fun read as well.

Just uploaded the presentation I gave at the Seminar “Architecture and Governance”:

On December 13th Whitehorses will host a seminar on SOA and Governance. During this seminar we will show the value of a proper architecture and governance for your organization. In the presentation you will get clear guidelines and steps on a pragmatic approach for implementing a manageable SOA solution.

Some of the topics:

• What is SOA Governance and Why do we need it?
• SOA reference architecture – The importance of solid standardization.
• Service life-cycle governance – Design and build the right services and the proper way to reuse them.
• Service repository – With examples of repositories based on Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and a wiki.

rsvp.

The session I presented at the SOA Symposium 2010 is now available online via InfoQ. You can find it as a Service Bus case study. It is introduced as:

a case study of using a service bus in a supply channel connecting a wholesale supplier with hundreds of retailers, the overall context and challenges faced – including the integration of POS software coming from different software providers-, the solution chosen and its implementation, how it worked out and the lessons learned along the way.

Watch the video, download the mp3 or sheets.

This year, in partnership with InfoQ.com (the largest community site for technical architects), 1/4th of the SOA Symposium sessions was filmed and will be published on InfoQ. From early November InfoQ has started publishing these videos. At the time of writing the following videos are available:

• Cloudy SOA
• BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010
• Resurrecting SOA

Cloudy SOA

This session on Cloudy SOA by Mark Little covers:

an introduction to cloud computing pointing to the fact that the middleware needs of the cloud are similar to SOA’s, showing some of the benefits of running SOA along with the cloud, asking if cloud computing and SOA should evolve together and giving some future directions to consider.

BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010

Hanjo Normann’s session presenting the BPM Top Seven Architectural Topics in 2010 covers:

how to design a BPM/SOA solution including: modeling human interaction, improving BPM models, orchestrating composed services, central task management, new approaches for business-IT alignment, solutions for non-deterministic processes, and choreography.

Resurrecting SOA

Anne Thomas Manes in her Resurrecting SOA session goes into details on why she:

believes organizations need SOA more than before, but using a redefined SOA based on the SOA Manifesto, focusing on models, methodologies and patterns, not on technology, intended to produce the desired business and technical goals.

For a complete overview of SOA Symposium sessions on InfoQ check their SOA Symposium page.

The agenda for the SOA Symposium 2010 has been posted. Again there are very interesting sessions during this 2 day conference. The largest and most comprehensive in the field of SOA and Cloud Computing. The Real World SOA Case Studies track offers a great opportunity to learn from the experience of others. In this track you will find:

Real-life accounts of successful and failed SOA projects discussed first-hand by those that experienced the project lifecycles and have a story to tell. These veteran practitioners will provide advice and insights regarding challenges, pitfalls, proven practices, and general project information that demonstrates the intricacies of implementing and governing service-oriented solutions in the real world.

I will be presenting the first session in this track on Using a Service Bus to Connect the Supply Chain. If you have any topics or questions in advance that you think I should address, please post them in the comments. Hope to meet you in Berlin.

On October 5 and 6 2010 the worlds largest SOA and Cloud Computing event will be held in Berlin; the SOA Symposium. The International SOA and Cloud Symposium brings together lessons learned and emerging topics from SOA and Cloud projects, practitioners and experts.

There is a call for presentations:

The SOA and Cloud Symposium 2010 program committees invite submissions on all topics related to SOA and Cloud, including but not limited to those listed in the preceding track descriptions. While contributions from consultants and vendors are appreciated, product demonstrations or vendor showcases will not be accepted.

All submissions must be received no later than June 30, 2010. An overview of the tracks can be found here. Other resources:

• My blogpost of the SOA Symposium 2009.
• Presentations from 2009.

After once again looking for good, useful definitions of Services and Process decided to put them here for future reference.

Service Orientation – Paul Allen

The following definitions come from Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices by Paul Allen.

A service is functionality that must be specified in the business context and in terms of the contracts between the provider of that functionality and its consumers. Implementation details should not be revealed. The implementation of the service does not have to be automated – it could consist of purely human activity.

A business process is a set of activities that is initiated by an event, transforms information or materials, and produces an output. These sets of activities are either value chains that produce outputs valued by customers or infrastructure processes that produce outputs that are valued by other processes.

With the remark that “a business process is usefully pictured as being composed of re-configurable services”.

A software service is a type of service that is implemented by software and that offers one or more operations (or software functuions).

Web services technology is a set of XML-based industry standards and specifications that specify a communication protocol (SOAP), a definition language (WSDL), and a publish-subscribe registry (UDDI).

Succeeding with SOA and Implementing SOA – Paul C. Brown

The following definitions were taken from Succeeding with SOA by Paul C. Brown. Who also wrote Implementing SOA.

A service is a unit of functionality packaged for convenience and consistent use.

With the remark that typically, this functionality consists of a body of information and a set of operations for managing this information.

A business process is a structured set of activities organized to produce results.

A process, or more specifically a discrete process, is a sequence of distinct activities that produces (or attempts to produce) discrete countable results.

An activity is a function performed by one or more agents that uses on or more inputs and produces one or more results.

SOA Design Patterns- Thomas Erl

This post could simply not exist without quotes from Thomas Erl. A complete list of his books in the Service-Oriented Computing series can be found on soabooks.com.

Services are collections of capabilities. A Service is a unit of solution logic to which service-orientation has been applied to a meaningful extent.

Services exist as physically independent software programs with specific design characteristics that support the attainment of the strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing.

A Web service is a body of solution logic that provides a physically decoupled technical contract consiting of a WSDL definition and one or more XML Schema definitions and possible WS-Policy expressions

In a Web service Capabilities are exposed as operations.