Expect agility first, cost efficiency comes later, much later

June 23rd, 2008

As a follow on to my Financial Times article here, I’d like to further point out that as many debate how long it takes for the benefits of SOA to be realized, proper context of which benefits is important, because all benefits are not created equal.  The statement I referred to in my article by […]

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SOA Top-down and Bottom-up / Flexibility and Reuse

May 3rd, 2008

SunGard meets regularly with its customers both individually as well as in groups and forums to gather input and validate direction.  One such counsel is the CSA & Infinity Customer Advisory Board, which is made up of technology leaders from a cross-section of the market we address.  In a recent meeting, I presented a process […]

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What will app platforms look like in 10 years?

April 12th, 2008

I find it fascinating to watch the current battles between application platforms for the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) paradigm.  I can’t help imagining what the application delivery landscape will look like in 10 years. 
Clearly, SaaS abstracts a number of things away, such as the Operating System (no longer visible, because in a SaaS environment exposes only the […]

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BPM a key to enabling business with SOA

March 4th, 2008

I get a fair amount of email with comments on my blog entries… usually people mention they have company policies that prohibit them from commenting on public blogs, (mostly Tier-1 Banks), so they send their comments via email instead of posting.  Because I comment on SOA in the Financial Services industry, a lot of folks […]

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The EVERYTHING-SOA Fantasy

February 21st, 2008

I regularly get to hear various vendor pitches on their SOA offerings.  It never ceases to amaze me how many pitch their offering as a “complete package”.  I usually get the biggest chuckle when a vendor merely dresses up a message involving an app that has existed for year, which magically and all of the […]

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BPM Utilities by themselves versus SOA, SaaS and Content

February 13th, 2008

At the Gartner BPM Summit last week it was apparent that a lot of BPM vendors are now making mention of SOA and some of SaaS.  Although I agree there is tremendous power and opportunity in these complementary concepts (see my blog on SOA+BPM+SaaS here), based upon what I saw at the Summit, I’m not […]

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Federation is a key to SOA

December 17th, 2007

People used to talk about centralizing everything to make an SOA work (centralized ESB, centralized registry, centralized policy enforcement, etc).  Although centralizing a team to manage an overall SOA effort is still a very popular and successful strategy, the centralization of the supporting technologies isn’t necessary (or practical) in many large organizations.  For example, SunGard […]

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SOA governance largely not established

October 6th, 2007

The SOA Forum surveyed over 500 organizations and concluded that nine out of ten haven’t figured out SOA governance.  I’m quoting it here because this find actually matches my experience with SOA initiatives I’m seeing in financial services IT organizations.  The banks that have advanced their SOA initiatives certainly have some form of governance, but […]

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SOA, a Business Facilitator

September 27th, 2007

This might sound shocking coming from a CTO, but SOA isn’t about technology, it’s about facilitating business.  Of course all of IT could be viewed that way.  I go deep into SOA projects in financial institutions on a regular basis and I find many of them initiated and driven out of IT, but with little […]

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SOA, SaaS, BPM and Open Source and Better Composite Solutions

August 3rd, 2007

If ever there were four completely independent concepts (in terms of evolution) that are destined to be related (even in the immediately family) and together revolutionize our thinking about how software delivers solutions to meet agile needs business needs, it is SOA, SaaS, BPM and Open Source. 
For a couple of decades people have made attempts […]

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