What Lies Ahead for SOA? - Page 2

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Mobile SOA capabilities

The aim of SOA is to enable new services through mashups for a richer and better user experience, so it makes sense to extend SOA to mobile devices, for which rich applications are increasingly emerging. BEA, now part of Oracle, introduced new software to enable SOA on handheld devices.

More recently, Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) unveiled its recently announced Mobile Enterprise Platform. This will enable technology to "bring interesting content, secure and orchestrate and personalize and deliver it to the billions of handheld devices out there," David Codelli, Sun's segment marketing manager for communications, told InternetNews.com.

The company is experimenting with orchestrating mobile SOA services in new ways in its Project Destination. For example, a subscriber going on a business trip can go to Project Destination and interface with an orchestrated weather report, which will provide weather forecasts for all the cities visited on a trip, Codelli said.

The back end of the Project Destination service will also orchestrate conference calls with different people in these cities and log them into his schedule. When it's time for a conference call, the service will automatically dial all attendees and set up the call.

The user can be automatically logged in to the communications device once he turns the handheld device on through single sign-on identity management for both applications and the communications network. Security technologies from Sun will prevent the device from being misused if it's lost or stolen.

New application development approaches

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is investing in a modeling platform based heavily on its Oslo project to update its technologies for SOA, announced in October.

This will "let you take services you have built, assemble them in an end-to-end application using our tooling and graphical editors, then take the model you've defined and run the model," Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in Microsoft's connected system division, told InternetNews.com. The model is the application, so changing it will change the behavior of the application.

Enterprises will be able to run the model on-premise or in the cloud. Previews of the technology for the model will be released for community technology preview at the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October.

While Microsoft is focusing on the technology, other vendors and analysts contend that as more companies move to SOA, the focus on business issues will increase. "SOA is an approach, not a technology, and you need to learn skills in IT and business, and take a holistic look at what changes SOA will evoke within your entire system," IBM's Carter said.

Over the next five years, businesses will place more emphasis on ways of structuring business information than on technology, Gartner analyst Nick Gall told InternetNews.com. "Our clients are beginning to realize that what can make SOA truly transformative is getting the right information model for your service architecture," he explained.

For example, they will work to get their business vocabularies, or semantics, in order. "What does the term 'account balance' mean to different departments? That's a business issue, not a technology issue," Gall said.

One result of the increased business focus that few realize will be the reuse of business processes in addition to IT processes. "The concept of a business service has emerged as opposed to the concept of a technical service," Software AG deputy chief technology officer Miko Matsumura told InternetNews.com.

[cob:Special_Report]A business service is composed of finer-grained technologies, Matsumura said. With business service reusability, "you command a larger piece of structure at one time."

As a consequence of the increased focus on business that will result from SOA, enterprises will require people with new sets of skills. IBM, which has more than 6,500 SOA deployments worldwide, believes people who have broad and deep business and technology skills and can communicate clearly with business and IT will be in increasing demand.

It has introduced a curriculum called service management in more than 2,000 universities worldwide to train people in these new capabilities. "We believe service science will be the new computer skill," Carter explained.