Tim O'Reilly Kills Web 2.0(sm)

In case you missed - The O'Reilly team and CMP wants to own the term "Web 2.0". This means one of two things:

1. Tim will return from vacation and shit in his drawers when he learns of the controversy

or

2. Tim will stand by his team and the term Web 2.0 will die.

All that I ask is that someone take a picture of Tim right after he finds out about the controversy and post it.

:-)

WiPro to compete with BPM ISV's

WiPro, an offshore consulting company, has decided to also write commercial grade BPM software and compete with their partners.

"Flow-briX is a complete BPM framework available in both J2EE and.NET platforms. With its unique customizability approach, we have been instrumental in offering best-in-class BPM /Workflow solutions to diversified market segments starting from Banking to Telecom, Media, Health Care and so on."

http://www.wipro.com/webpages/itservices/flowbrix/index.htm

Traditionally, this is a really bad move - I don't expect anything to be different this time.

SOA Testing

Recently, we've been working on our SOA testing methodology. As many of you know, testing becomes more complicated in any environment that has lots of shared resources (like SOA) and where they resources may be changed/versioned.

I recently had an interaction with Wayne Ariola at Parasoft, where he offered the following advice:

The key points from my point of view:

1) From a quality point of view the test driven process requires a SOA Aware testing framework. This means that the framework must be aware of the intermediary rich environment as well as the distributed nature elements required for the overall business process.

2) As the title of the presentation suggests, the onus of quality resides with development. Ensuring that new versions conform to published interfaces cannot be a QA function - in fact development must take an additional step to understand the impact of the change versus the regression suites as well as the overall business process. This business service orientation and the iteration/evolution of services will not be as convenient for QA to test as they are used to in an application centric environment.

3) Connection to the code. This is the big bang! Development must not only ensure that the service version is robust but must also tie the message layer changes to suite of code level regression tests.

The Parasoft SOA Quality Solution is built on an SOA Aware test framework that allows the user to exercise the message layer for security, reliability, performance and compliance as well as drive code level component tests from the message layer by automatically creating Junit test cases.

This got me thinking - what are the Golden Rules of SOA testing? Well, I think I've got my list which I intend to share at the Infoworld SOA event next week. Should be fun!

The SOA Hype Cycle

There have been a series of articles recently either bashing SOA or identifying that it has hit "rock bottom". Most of the people who take the time to write this are actually pretty big fans of SOA. Here's my take - analyst, press and vendors all believe in the hype cycle and many of them believe in 'self-fulfilling prophecies'. I am of the opinion that certain individuals are attempting to prematurely force the 'trough of disillusionment'. The thinking is that if they can declare the bottom of the trough then we can move on to the 'slope of enlightenment'. We can't force the hype cycle - up or down. It will happen on its own.

IMHO, we are still early in the cycle - very early. We're no where near hitting the bottom. Prepare for more smack talk - more crapping on SOA, especially from vendors who don't have products to meet the market or enterprises who were too stupid to figure it out.

I am predicting that after rock bottom is hit, the uplift will be much quicker than most. The reason is simple: SOA has a network effect. When the service network hits critical mass the value of the network is too high to ignore. Most organizations aren't there yet - they have 10 to 50 services (and 11-51 clients). The reuse numbers will stink for some time. Like a network - you'll know when it hits critical mass - when it's too big to ignore.

If you're interested in the actual hype/activity curve, check out:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=soa

SOA Software Acquires Blue Titan

Yesterday, SOA Software announced the acquisition of Blue Titan, a provider of service networking infrastructure.

First, I'd like to congratulate Frank Martinez (aka, "Slim"). I'd also like to congratulate the people over at SOA Software for seeing and acting on this opportunity. Those who have worked with Blue Titan over the years realize that they have a multi-part value proposition: 1. The value of their current product suite, 2. The value of their vision. SOA Software acquired both product and vision.

The on-going consolidation in this market is good for everyone. We now have fewer vendors with better product suites enabling customers to buy integrated solutions. What remains unclear is who the big winners in the space will be; who will be the Mercator of the space? Who will be the Tibco?

SOA Software has assembled a set of product technologies that will enable them to compete on the multi-part RFP's that are floating around. However, their suite of tools now has overlap with many of the pure play vendors (SOA Mainframe Enablement, SOA Security Devices, SOA Mediation, SOA Monitoring, etc.) Recently, the game for small companies has been one of 'partnering in the ecosystem'. Guys like Systinet, Actional, Parasoft and GT Software have shown their ability to pull together to promote their individual and collective causes. However, the rapid consolidation is diminishing the ability for the small companies to "eco-partner" due to their new parent companies having overlap in their portfolio (Mercury, Progress, BEA, etc.) We are close to reaching the point where *enough* of the SOA mass has moved from pure play to conglomerate. When this happens the eco-partner system falls apart due to lack of critical mass and value proposition. This sets the stage for phase 2 of the battle - the battle of the conglomerates.

With the acquisition of Blue Titan, SOA Software may have bought some industrial strength software - but let's get real, what they really bought was a mean general to fight the real war.