Web Services and SOA vs. Platform Integration

Matt Powell — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 01:32:00 GMT

re: Web Services = end of platform integration costs

Graham Murray — Fri, 04 Jul 2003 18:40:00 GMT

Matt,

Stumbled across this from your article 'Hello from TechEd 2003'. As a freelance consultant with a vested interest in integrating data from disparate systems, I was initially rather concerned to read your analysis of the ZapThink report. (That's the end of what's left of my gravy train, I thought !)

However, as ever with these things, I mulled it over a bit, and while I understand your thinking on this, I think there is a (very) long road to travel before we get to the scenario you have painted.

Unless there is something I don't get (which is possible - because unfortunately my nose is pressed to the legacy grindstone more often than not), the big hole IMHO is the metadata/dictionary stuff. The wrapped-services could be 'discovered and consumed' easily enough, but how do you ensure that the quality of the integration is there. Let's say that a marketing person in a global co. wants to compare sales from a division operating in another country (and load the figures into Excel, say). The local sales are in pounds sterling and the comparison country's sales are in Euros. Are the developers of the wrapped services really going to have had the foresight to see this sort of scenario ? More problematic would be expanding or collapsing differing reporting hierarchies, as appropriate.

If there are developments that you feel would address these issues, I be interested to hear about them - and any other comments you may have.

Thanks,
Graham.