[Info-vax] Seasons Greetings

[Main, Kerry]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com [mailto:info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com] On
> Behalf Of Arne Vajhøj
> Sent: December 31, 2008 10:12 PM
> To: info-vax at rbnsn.com
> Subject: Re: [Info-vax] Seasons Greetings
>
> Main, Kerry wrote:
> > Yep, I still maintain there is going to be a return to the basics as
> > Companies can no longer afford grandiose SOA / "latest rip-n-replace
> > craze of the month" distributed programming strategy developed by the
> > analyst / university / whoever theorists.
>
> Companies can not afford not to do SOA. It is pretty expensive not
> to reuse.
>

No. - that is one of the biggest fallacies about SOA. In theory yes, re-use
always makes sense, but the biggest challenges with SOA is that it requires
massive changes in a companies culture.

Ever wonder why DCE never made it big in the real world? Again, the answer
is not technical, but rather company culture and politics.

Here is an article from CIO magazine that sheds additional light on SOA
challenges:

"The Truth About SOA"
http://www.cio.com/article/print/21975

> SOA is most definitely not about replacing systems. You could argue
> that SOA is about not replacing systems.
>
> Distributed environments is a reality today. And it is not going
> to go away tomorrow.
>

Again - another fallacy that needs to be challenged.

While I have no doubt you really believe this from a programmers point
of view, you also need to consider that this distributed approach is 180
degrees different from the Operations side of the house which is implementing
massive server and DC consolidation projects. They are under massive pressure
to reduce IT costs and distributed systems are extremely expensive and
difficult to manage because of the inherent complexities.

Of course, distributed systems will always be around, but the huge focus
today is on centralized strategies. Shared services, cloud computing and other
buzz words are just today's terms for what used to be known as timesharing
(SLA's, service catalogues, capacity planning, centralized control of resources,
very high security and HA etc).

VM consolidation will be the next big thing once a company completes most
Of the VMware/other server virtualization projects.

Even SAP now recommends putting App Servers on the same OS instance as the DB
Server as a means to consolidate OS's.

> SOA is not a university thing. They still do OCAML, Haskell and
> similar - SOA is practical thing.
>

SOA is based on strategies that are great in theory, but are extremely difficult
to justify in terms of ROI as well as politics and changing an entire companies
culture.

> Typical SOA advocates have 10-25 years of experience.
>

With no fully completed company wide SOA projects to base their decisions on.


[snip ..]


Regards

Kerry Main
Senior Consultant
HP Services Canada
Voice: 613-254-8911
Fax: 613-591-4477
kerryDOTmainAThpDOTcom
(remove the DOT's and AT)

OpenVMS - the secure, multi-site OS that just works.