Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

Twitter: @jshah0209

In his key note address at this year’s Gartner AADI Summit, Jeff Schulman, Vice President, Gartner, compelled everyone to focus on SOA Governance. He described SOA Governance as the key to adopting SOA and realizing its benefits. Further, he felt that SOA Governance was do or die and without governance one might as well flush their SOA investments down the drain and update their resumes! While this statement may sound a bit over the top, it simply emphasizes the fact that it is not possible to benefit from SOA without SOA Governance. In fact, governance is an integral part of SOA, much like the very acts of building and using services. And yet this relationship may be not obvious to everyone. Many practitioners still wonder if and when their SOA needs governance. This disconnect is due to the misconception that the choice to govern your SOA is different from the choice to adopt SOA. In reality, SOA efforts of any size will require you to adopt basic practices like:

- Think holistically about services that should be built to support the business
- Make decisions about ownership and funding of creation, operation and maintenance of shared services
- Ensure services are built to interoperability standards
- Ensure correct use of services by consumers
- Make service level expectations and reality transparent
- Manage change to shared services while addressing the needs of all parties

If you are doing one or more these things, you already have a level of governance in place! Given that SOA by definition involves multiple autonomous participants (consumers and providers), governance cannot be avoided. And as a corollary, if you are doing none of these things, you don’t really have an SOA and are unlikely to achieve its benefits.

When it comes to SOA governance, the right question to ask is not if or when, but how much? In the early days of SOA adoption, you will likely focus on the basics as described above. The scope of governance will grow along with growth in number of services and number of autonomous participants

Finally, keep in mind that the goal of specialized tools like CentraSite, Mediator and Insight is to support and scale your governance efforts. This decision to use such tools should be driven by how much more efficient and more effective these tools make your governance efforts.

Jignesh Shah

Twitter: @jshah0209

Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

Last month I met several customers at Software AG Tech Fairs hosted in Boston, Chicago and DC. At each event, we conducted a special session to get feedback on our ideas for the future and what customers might expect from us. One of the topics was support for additional WS-* standards. Across the board, this topic drew blank stares, shrugs and an occasional cynical remark like – “the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”. The latest feedback from our Toronto event is more of the same – no interest. This lack of interest is a huge shift from just a couple of years ago when WS-* standards were highly discussed and hotly debated.

Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

SOA adoption continues to take root and grow at many organizations. But there is still much misinformation about the concept and how to best apply it. The situation is made worse by continued theoretical and philosophical debates about SOA. Now, a group of SOA practitioners and thought-leaders is attacking this distraction head on by creating an SOA Manifesto. The group has created an explanation of SOA and its guiding principles available at http://www.soa-manifesto.org/.

Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

This week Software AG hosted the fourth SOA Summit in Scottsdale, AZ.This event had some heavy odds stacked against it. The first three events were free and hosted conveniently in major cities like New York, Copenhagen and Stockholm. In contrast, we chose to make SOA Summit ‘09 a destination event requiring fees and 2-3 day travel to a resort in Scottsdale, AZ. With SOA gaining momentum, we wanted to separate serious SOA practitioners from curious bystanders. We made this plan back in September 08. Since then, the global economy has cratered, companies have put in travel freezes and some pundits have seeded doubt by declaring SOA dead. What else could go wrong? How about an “imminent pandemic” causing people to avoid travel and public gatherings?