I've just read a blog by Dave Chappel of Sonic Software, titled Setting/Getting Available Languages in the portal using code. Dave Chappel is vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic Software, a company that makes message queuing software for Java. I worked with him several years ago developing the ebXML Messaging standard. Dave has also recently been honored by the editors of JavaPro for an "Outstanding Contribution to the Java Community by an Individual. So he has some good credentials.
In the blog he identifies five main lessons that are critical to realizing business value from SOA. These lessons were derived from a series of seminars Dave has been running around the world with SOA architects from many companies. So his conclusions are based on talking with people working, right now, on developing solutions using a Service Oriented Architecture. Anyway, his final conclusion is that ...
style="font-style: italic;">"Its not so much about how to extract business value from SOA, its more about how to extract value from the assets that you have in place"
... he then goes on to say that to do this you need to ...
style="font-style: italic;">"recognize the ability for a SOA to be able to leverage existing application assets, and expose them using service level abstractions that are loosely coupled, and standards based"
... sounds like what SAP is doing with ESA - exposing business functionality in existing SAP systems using web services standards.
He also says that ...
style="font-style: italic;">"The underlying IT infrastructure which supports those business processes [built from the services that have been abstracted] needs to be flexible and capable of adapting to change."
... sounds to me like NetWeaver with its integration and business process management capabilities.
There is one area that Dave misses and that is exploiting your business partner's assets by building new business processes that cross your own style="text-decoration: underline;">and your partners applications. Bottom line though, I agree with what Dave Chappel is saying. He is reinforcing the ESA/NetWeaver story strongly. Worth a read. Here's the link ...
