App-Dev Game Changer

Today, with Web services and especially a systems-oriented architecture (SOA), those same applications could be set up in minutes.

"SOAs take mainframe transactional applications and Web-enable them, which means services are now available in a variety of ways because you start by enabling applications as services," says Bloomberg, now a senior analyst at ZapThink, an IT market-intelligence firm based in Waltham, Mass.

The emergence of services-based infrastructures is changing the way application developers work and is slowly but surely providing evidence to some companies of the wisdom of moving away from software.

Bloomberg predicts that SOAs will "shake the systems-integration industry to the core." As more companies implement SOAs and Web services, he says, the need for integration decreases dramatically, forcing systems integrators to rethink their own business models. "A big part of what SOAs and Web services do is enable software to integrate automatically, so it changes the whole systems-integration business because it makes it easier for applications to talk to each other," he says.

Bloomberg and ZapThink view SOAs as a much more deeply executed endeavor than Web services, including architectural guidance at the enterprise level which, in Bloomberg's words, "provides a framework for building services within the context of the SOA."

SOA Players
Computer Associates and Hewlett-Packard are the furthest along in pursuing strategies and products for the SOAs and Web-services market at this point, according to ZapThink, which also lists enterprise vendors such as BEA, IBM and Microsoft as making an aggressive push. Among lesser-known companies, Actional's SOAPstation Edge, Amber Point's Exception Manager, Infravio's Ensemble and Westbridge Technology's XML Message Server are examples of SOA-based solutions that are beginning to impact the sector.

In addition, InfoPower Systems, an applications developer and systems integrator in Deerfield, Ill., has created SnapXT, a rapid application development and deployment environment that automates business processes. Company president Jonathan Sapir calls it a "personal-services builder" that enables rank-and-file employees to use their technical knowledge to build their own Web-based systems. While they may not be as deeply skilled as the IT staff, those employees know their way around the technology enough to recognize the services that would make their jobs easier. SnapXT helps them assemble their concepts into usable services that can then be "snapped" together with other services to achieve specific business goals.

"There's a rapidly changing workforce that's much more tech-savvy. They're not interested in waiting for their IT staff to develop the technology for them, and the number of things it would be nice for an IT staff to automate would be difficult to justify all at once," Sapir says. "This allows them to build the services for themselves and hook them into the whole system."

William Kimmel, an applications architect at ThoughtWorks, a systems integrator and SOA advocate in Chicago, says, "Anyone can create an application, but making one that works with your system is harder, and that's where SOAs come in. People were once trying to use Web services for everything, but it's better-suited for coarser applications than for anything too highly transactional."

Sapir refutes the notion that making it easier for anyone to plug in esoteric services on a whim creates the potential for a chaotic, lawless system. Rather, Sapir says, the services that individuals are building give them just enough of the bare-bones elements they need. He likens an SOA-enabled organization to an ant colony, where each individual is responsible for himself but works toward the greater good of the group. "As long as a service can be synched with the other services, it will work," he says. "It's important that everyone understands what the service's purpose is."

And that, he says, is where service providers come in. "This gives VARs an opportunity as the facilitator, hooking the services together and linking in the legacy applications as well," Sapir says. "They can teach the users how to build the services on their own and make them usable by everyone else." In fact, the ability to link these bite-sized components is a strong selling point for anyone who's pitching a budget-conscious company on re-engineering its architecture.

NetNumina, for one, a systems integrator in Cambridge, Mass., is pitching SOAs to clients in a variety of industries, particularly financial services. Tim Carbery, the company's chief systems architect, says SOAs have great appeal in business-to-business gateways.

"People's resistance to Web services was often just a knee-jerk reaction to a technology they didn't understand, but the re-emergence of portals is getting people to realize the need for SOAs," he says. "People see the value of things like a dashboard or a relational portal and know that they require strong integration."

Another key difference, he says, is his company's ability to pitch SOAs to the executive board directly rather than relying on an IT staff member to explain a vague technological concept. "Web services were solving an IT problem," Carbery says. "SOAs are solving a business problem. They're definitely helping us approach new clients at the top levels of companies."

Despite encouraging signs, the SOA concept is in its infancy, which will change with time and some economic luck. "People are still reluctant to make major IT investments, but fortunately SOAs lend themselves to phased rollouts, and they must be able to show positive ROIs at every step," ZapThink's Bloomberg says.