A popular theme these days is the software distribution method known as Software-as-a-Service. Although it’s clear the capabilities of SaaS are finding tremendous uptake with applications such as CRM and related offerings, there are markets that require an enhanced context for software services to continue to grow. Financial Services, for instance require highly configurable services […]
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Just following up on my last post, more evidence that SOAs are living up to their hype is appearing. According to a recently published research from programming consultancy Evans Data Corp, nearly half of 400 Web Services programmers surveyed have already participated in successful SOA development efforts, and that SOA development efforts are finishing on time. Click more for analysis on this.
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I’ve noticed a number of articles and blogs recently bashing the adoption rate of SOA. From one that is on the front line every day with banks and their SOA efforts, I can honestly say with experience, that adoption is very much alive and well. I’m usually amazed at how hype cycles set unrealistic expectations; when will we learn that there is rarely any correlation between the hype and reality? I can only assume the expectations are what fuel the “where are the SOAs” boobing. Click more for some thoughts on this.
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Lately I’ve had a number of discussions with some of the largest banks in the world regarding SOA Governance, primarily due to a new offering out of SunGard’s consulting organization around that very topic. With the massively distributed nature of most banks, many of them admit there are significant challenges to SOA governance in environments where disparate stakeholders are tugging at their own architectures into distinct directions, causing a spaghetti infrastructure. In one particular case, the senior-most IT executive in the room declared Service-Oriented Architectures a dream that can’t be achieved without limiting the scope to exclude large portions of their organization. “Governance, shmovernance,” he said in jest (I bet you’d never guess we were in a NY office). Although I agree that starting small and focusing on some early, easy wins is a key to any SOA strategy, refer to my 7 Lessons white paper here and my blog on the topic here. His sentiment was more in line with permanently carving out large parts of the organization from involvement. We had a creative and productive discussion regarding methods in which a federated process could indeed assist a global organization in realizing an SOA initiative. Click more to read a summary some of the ideas we discussed.
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As the SaaS hype cycle continues to climb, deficiencies are becoming apparent, such as true configurability of the desired solution, in other words if it’s merely a canned app, aren’t we just talking about ASP? Click more below to see what’s up SunGard’s sleeve relative to SaaS.
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I’ve evangelized the SunGard concept of a Registry often (the CSA Registry, or asset catalog of services from decomposed applications), and although I firmly believe in the necessity of any SOA effort, I’d like to make it clear that success with collaborative Service Oriented Architectures involves a large number of synchronized, yet parallel initiatives. This came up in a conversation with an analyst last week during SunGard World in Dallas, where the conversation hung on my focus on the Registry concept. Click more below to review some of the points I made relative to other key attributes of SunGard’s SOA initiatives.
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As a follow up to my last blog, (Trend Virtual), I continue to see more evidence that the expectation is that the service delivery of software will overtake the traditional binary-installation delivery of software at some point. Perhaps not next year, or even five years from now, but the growth projected is intriguing. A Gartner report predicts that Software-as-a-Service (accounting for merely 5% of spending last year), will increase to 25% by 2011, a healthy increase in merely 5 years from now. I wonder if the real number will be a bit higher, because Gartner’s predictions are heavily weighted with CRM sales (although Salesforce.com is clearly leading the way in CRM SaaS delivery, there are many other industries that have been working diligently on decomposing apps into configurable services for delivery in an SaaS model… like, for example, SunGard, but more on that in a future blog soon).
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I’m continually amazed by how many things trend virtual. This is a very relevant subject regarding where SunGard is going, and in general where computing services and software is heading. Click more below for a discussion on historical virtualizations as well as trends going forward.
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I was recently asked by a customer to summarize SunGard’s lessons learned through our effort of defining, designing and implementing the collaborative SOA we call the CSA. The typical large organization in the Financial Industry is a complex system of independent domains. SunGard (a provider of software to the Financial Industry) is likewise a very complex system with many independent parts, (over 100 acquisitions, 200 products, $4 billion in annual revenue, 25,000 customers in 50 countries, $25 trillion in investment assets managed daily on SunGard systems, and over 5 million trades processed daily on SunGard systems). Due to the similarities in characteristics between many large financial institutions and SunGard, and also due to additional interest on the subject, I’ve decided to summarize in my blog the lessons we’ve learned over the past 5 years in getting our collaboration working accross SunGard, a historically siloed organization. Click more below to review lessons learned in defining, designing and implementing a collaborative SOA at SunGard.
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Software vendors in nearly every vertical and horizontal market segment are exploring the Software-as-a-Service model. However, isn’t the reality of what’s available today in the SaaS model simply the running of software remotely for customers? And, hasn’t that been done for well over a decade? Clearly the confluence of widespread wireless connections, low-cost servers, web technologies and the ability to host data from multiple customers on pooled computing resources has propelled this movement forward. But the purest definition of SaaS is much more than what we see available today. Click more below to read my views on what’s going on generally and learn where SunGard is headed relative to SaaS.
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