In his opening keynote address at SOA World 2007 West in San Francisco, Software AG Deputy CTO Miko Matsumura challenged an SOA World audience to make service-oriented architecture core to their enterprise operations over the coming year. Citing the transformational success of earlier adopters, Matsumura argued that current laggards risked ceding an insurmountable advantage to their competitors if they did not accelerate their adoption of SOA.

He also urged attendees to look beyond today’s often artificial litmus tests for architectural purity in order to embrace a more pragmatic and evolutionary approach to SOA adoption.

VIEW MIKO MATSUMURA KEYNOTE ON SYS-CON.TV HERE

SYS-CON.TV's SOA Power Panel live from the SOA World Conference &
Expo, on Monday, November 12, 2007, in San Franacisco.
Panel included Kyle Gabhart of Web Age Solutions, Kevin Hakman
of TIBCO, Sandy Zylka of NextAxiom, and Miko Matsumura of Software AG

“Working with far less than what’s available today, SOA pioneers have begun to breakaway from the pack in terms of their operational agility and time-to-market. While challenges remain to successful adoption, they’re dwarfed by the competitive risks associated with maintaining the status quo,” said Matsumura. “What I’m proposing is a methodology that builds out over time from the core elements required for service interoperability, orchestration and governance. By minimizing the upfront investment to just these foundational components, users can more easily capitalize on immediate opportunities while creating a solid foundation for a sustainable implementation.”

Matsumura’s keynote – entitled "Time Oriented Architecture: Evolution by Design?" – was inspired by experience gathered from his work on hundreds of real-world SOA projects. In particular, the emerging tension that exists between the needs for a solid foundation to anchor a sustainable implementation and the often chaotic consumption patterns associated with Web 2.0 mash-ups, composite applications and business process orchestration.

As Matsumura noted in his presentation, the defining characteristic of an SOA isn’t the service itself, but rather, the relationship between producers and consumers of services. As such, the orientation of the architecture should actually be focused on orchestrating these dynamic relationships instead of simply enabling passive services.

According to Matsumura, the key policies and enforcement infrastructure required for managing these relationships emphasize:

• Interoperability – Validation and assurance that services are truly interoperable in a federation context.
• Security – Ensuring appropriate access control, privacy, data security and other federated security controls are in place across the service lifecycle.
• Bind-time Policies – An enforcement mechanism that prevents tightly-coupled endpoints while facilitating contracts through a service intermediary paradigm.

By focusing on these components as core to their SOA strategy, Matsumura argued that enterprises can accelerate their successful and sustainable adoption of SOA.

Added Matsumura, “enterprises need a minimum set of SOA governance policies to get started with. If you have the ability to deal with interop, security and binding, you can address subsequent requirements as your implementation matures. By approaching SOA in terms of a virtuous cycle, you can create the tipping point or catalyst for adoption that is missing within too many enterprises today.”

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