Enterprise IT's 'Moment of Truth' has arrived, according to Sandy Zylka, a co-founder of NextAxiom and the co-inventor of the company's seven patent-pending innovations. Zylka, who participates in consulting services to NextAxiom customers as a Principal SOA Architect, unveils NextAxiom's concept of its platform as being akin to 'Next-Generation Middleware on Tap' in this interview with SOAWorld Magazine's Jeremy Geelan.
SOAWorld Magazine: What does NextAxiom do/provide?
Sandy Zylka: We provide an alternative to middleware for building composite applications and integration solutions. Middleware today is far too complex and naturally results in complex applications… and our industry keeps adding more and more moving parts just to move us an inch further. This is a sign that the current middleware approach has reached its limit.
Think about the complexity of middleware: to run integrated business applications today, you need an application server, integration server, rules engine, message broker, event broker, ESB, workflow engine, data transfer and transformation engine, process server, BPM engine, BPEL engine, service governance and management, metadata management & repository, caching & cache management… and the list goes on and on. And with all these tools, you still have to take the core of your business and application logic and lock it in Java or C# code.
NextAxiom gives you a different kind of platform to build integrated solutions without all of that middleware complexity. When you think of NextAxiom think of “SOA inside” rather than “SOA on top but inflexible concrete inside.”
SOAWorld Magazine: How were you able to reduce complexity – What’s the secret sauce?
Sandy Zylka: The core difference starts with “SOA inside”: we grabbed service-orientation and took it in-memory. Then we used that as a foundation for building model-driven software modules. We optimized the platform so that those model-driven modules would outperform hand-coded components in an app server.
This in-memory service-orientation, combined with SOA standards for going across systems, gives us a new way of integrating. We call it “inside-out integration.” This is brokerless integration that becomes inherently part of your software solution, rather than an afterthought. Because it’s already model-driven, it eliminates the need for all those 10’s of niche, model-driven productivity tools that run on top of today’s app servers. So you have a single orientation and a single concept that can do what otherwise would require a slew of moving middleware parts, and it can do it 10x better. And the best part is that you get well-designed SOA automatically. SOA is no longer a destination or a journey – it’s just a by-product of this approach.
SOAWorld Magazine: Is this “PowerPoint theory” or is it real?
Sandy Zylka: We have developed this platform under the radar during the past 8 years. It was first deployed in 2002 at Eastman Chemical. It is now deployed in over 7 countries, and is robust enough to be used by some of the largest energy & utility companies in the world. And believe me, utility companies don’t run their business on PowerPoint.
SOAWorld Magazine: So, you eliminate the need for middleware, but what if I’ve already invested a lot in middleware?
Sandy Zylka: Because of its pure service-orientation and “SOA inside” characteristic, the NextAxiom platform can leverage all of your software assets including what you have built on your middleware, or it can simply outsource some of the work to other tools that you are already acquainted with. So, it’s not an all-or-none value proposition.
The question is, moving forward, do you want to continue spending $4 in solution for every dollar you spend in middleware to deliver your new solutions, or do you want to spend one dollar on solution for each dollar in platform? We are talking about a 60% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership and a significant difference in responsiveness to change. You have an incremental path to adopting this platform. Start with a single situational or composite application, and leverage all of your existing software assets… including your middleware. Once you are comfortable with the platform consider the economics of your solutions moving forward.
SOAWorld Magazine: How is the platform delivered?
Sandy Zylka: The platform can be installed on-premise, or delivered as a managed service on a service grid. It can also be delivered as an appliance inside the firewall that securely connects the enterprise assets back to the service grid.
SOAWorld Magazine: With every new approach come new opportunities, what kind of new opportunities are created with your approach?
Sandy Zylka: There are three areas of opportunities:
First of all, this platform “rehydrates” Best of breed application vendors whose value proposition is currently lost by the overhead of integration. When they embed NextAxiom, they’ll have brokerless, “inside-out-integration” without requiring data replication or complex middleware. This rehydration of best-of-breed applications is good for enterprise IT, so that we don’t end up with just two Mega application vendors… because that’d be the end of innovation.
The second opportunity is for Enterprise IT who can now enable and deliver all those situational composite apps that couldn’t be cost-justified or would take too long to deliver using the existing middleware stack.
The third is an area of mega-opportunities and it has to do with the platform being offered as a “Next Generation Middleware on Tap”. This is because the NextAxiom platform was designed from the ground-up to support multi-tenancy and remote development. Now SIs have a platform for solution delivery, reusability, and even recurring revenue. Best of Breed ISVs have a channel to reach more customers. Telecoms, which already specialize in providing managed platform services, can act as a channel and provide this platform as a managed service – and that’s a high-margin business as opposed to just hosting services or ASP. And, finally, enterprise IT is the biggest winner because of the economies of scale.
SOAWorld Magazine:
You have been in business for over seven years now. Why have you waited so long to start talking about your platform innovation?
Sandy Zylka: It takes time to build “real” stuff and creating hype, marketecture, and pre-mature demand wasn’t an acceptable approach to us. “Tipping points” may be reached overnight but a comprehensive platform is not created and perfected overnight. As for exposure, it’s all about timing. It’s like drafting in a bicycle race; you don’t always want to be the one in the front.
One of the indicators we’ve used for the best timing is the mainstream adoption of SOA and that’s when SOA becomes “unfashionable” with the early adopters and first movers in IT. We think SOA is passed what Gartner calls the “Trough of Disillusionment” and headed for what they call the “Slope of Enlightenment.” Climbing that slope requires innovative and real products. We have focused all of our energy on preparing products, for years, to take the first position in that climb. Gartner calls it the “Slope of Enlightenment” we call it the “Moment of Truth.”
Now, you’ve gotta pace yourself: we expect the “Moment” to take 3 to 4 years. Good things are always real and real things don’t happen overnight.
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