Agility through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one way companies can respond to changing business dynamics. In this talk from Catalyst 2005, the Burton Group's research director Anne Thomas Manes offers a roadmap and some practical advice on the cultural, design and infrastructure challenges which must be addressed for businesses to begin realizing the benefits of SOA.
The shift to the loosely coupled architecture of SOA based on web services can be disruptive to managers and developers alike. Manes argues that cultural changes are perhaps the most daunting, since object-oriented developers must move from a more controlled way of thinking to a more integrated approach. To build loosely coupled systems with reusables services spanning different organizations, it helps to think in terms of business problems and solution rather than applications and tools per se. Making this shift requires good governance, training, collaboration and positive incentives for change - that is, SOA as a lifestyle.
SOA is still young and somewhat incomplete, but Manes outlines a number of advances that standards bodies, consortia and vendors have made towards building a workable set of policies, specifications and products. Manes concludes with some practical recommendations on how businesses can pull the pieces together and benefit from further progress in building out the architecture.
Anne Thomas Manes is APS Research Director with Burton Group, a research and consulting firm. Manes is a widely recognized industry expert on Web Services. She is the author of Web Services: A Manager's Guide. In 2002, NetworkWorld named Manes one of the 50 most powerful people in networking. The previous year she received a similar honor from Enterprise Systems Journal, who listed her among the 2001 Power 100 IT Leaders. She is a frequent speaker at trade shows and author of numerous articles. She is a member of the editorial board of Web Services Journal. Manes participates in Web Services standards development efforts at JCP, W3C, and OASIS.
Before joining Burton Group, Manes took a sabbatical and spent six months writing her book. She formed Bowlight at that time to host her independent consulting activities. Prior to that she was the Chief Technology Officer at Systinet, the web services infrastructure company. Before joining Systinet, Manes was Director of Market Innovation at Sun Microsystems, where she pioneered Sun's Web Services strategies. She also served as a Senior Analyst with Patricia Seybold Group, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the "Distributed Computing Monitor" newsletter. Manes developed her expertise working at a number of the world's leading hardware and software companies. She maintains the weblog The View From the Bow.
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This free podcast is from our Burton Group Catalyst series.
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