IBM Hursley, SOA, ESB and Consulting

re: IBM Hursley, SOA, ESB and Consulting

Richard G Brown — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 01:23:16 GMT

Very interesting article... Thanks for taking the time to expand on the points, Rich.

I've added some thoughts of my own from the perspective of an IBM Software Services consultant. Here: http://gendal.blogspot.com/2005/12/we-dont-all-work-for-global-services.html

re: IBM Hursley, SOA, ESB and Consulting

Ronan Bradley — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:03:30 GMT

Hi Rich,
Thought-provoking opinion as always - and plenty of ground covered in a single post!

Firstly, I think you are fixating a little on the use of SOA platform as a term - it is clear enough to convey what we are talking about. Knocking a concept purely because it uses some jargon would be a dangerous precident for the software industry!

To address a more substantive point, I totally reject the idea that SOA, or the ESB, are simply some form 'evolved EAI' because they address similar challenges in a (very broadly) similar way. The functional scope of the product is not the issue.

What killed EAI was not what it could do, but how it went about doing it. These products were proprietary, complex, required scarce skills and as a result delivered lousy productivity and spiralling costs. In this case what you might appear to be small differences between traditional EAI and current ESB, deliver dramatically different results. We know, because our customers tell us.

Having said all that, I am a pragmatist. I believe that the primary job of any integration vendor is to address specific business issues and in doing so deliver return on investment. Most organizations don't want to be sold an architecture, or an ESB, for it's own sake. They do, however, want to adopt new approaches to integration - approaches that are standards-based, flexible, agile, and designed to support the loosely-coupled integration that is an essential aspect of SOA adoption. If customers and analysts find the label "ESB" to be a convenient short-hand for those approaches, then vendors are hardly likely to disagree.

Regarding my comments around IBM - they were intended to illustrate what I think is happening in the ESB market. To some extent I agree that the term is confusing, but only because so many products have jumped on the bandwagon. With that in mind I argue that ESBs really break down into two categories - and that only the "fully featured" variety is likely to succeed in complex real-world environments.

re: IBM Hursley, SOA, ESB and Consulting

James — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:32:25 GMT

Really curious question. How come not a single MS product actually ships with a WSDL file?

The lost outpost » Blog Archive » SOA and the IBM product stack

The lost outpost » Blog Archive » SOA and the IBM product stack — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:14:37 GMT

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re: IBM Hursley, SOA, ESB and Consulting

Bill Higgins — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 14:52:18 GMT

Hi Rich, just posted a response to this post on my IBM developerWorks blog:

http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/BillHiggins?entry=software_group_global_services_and

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