SOA - News, Features, and Slideshows

Features

• Selling the new enterprise architecture - Part 3

  Despite its value, TOGAF can suffer from intrinsic shortcomings in the process by which EAs are selected and trained.

• Selling the new enterprise architecture - Part 2

  Despite years spent trying to encourage staff to think along business lines, many CIOs are still finding technology-focused EAs unable to think in business terms, and vice versa. Even though CIOs most certainly know better, Gartner figures suggest that just 9 per cent of enterprise architecture efforts will be built around business goals this year, with that figure growing to just 30 per cent by 2016.

• Selling the new enterprise architecture - Part 1

  A ‘service’, of course, is an abstraction of the underlying functions, systems and policies used to deliver business outcomes. Service-centred IT therefore reflects the need for clarity and commonality of vision between business executives, the CIO, and the enterprise architects (EAs) and other operational staff charged with actually delivering that vision.

• Cloud Computing: What CIOs Need to Know About Integration

  Cloud computing promises the ability to move applications and systems to the location and platform that makes the most sense--in terms of risk and economics--at any given time.

• Cloud Computing Poses Control Issues for IT

  Though most U.S. companies still list customer and other corporate information as their most valuable assets, many keep pushing this data farther from safe lockdown in the data center--and are about to give it another strong shove in that direction.

• How IT Outsourcing Customers Can Test Cloud Computing

  Aspects of cloud computing have been available to-and rejected by-IT outsourcing customers for years, from hosted applications to on-demand hardware support. But as the breadth of the cloud has expanded to include a growing number of software-, platforms- and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings that can be quickly deployed as needed with low management overhead and little vendor interaction, the temptation to move away from traditional IT services provisioning is mounting.

• Google Jumps Into Social Bookmarks Game

  Google jumped into social bookmarking this week with its new experimental Bookmarks feature, Lists. Lists lets you save links--handy, for example, if you're planning a vacation or compiling information for a presentation--then share them with others or keep them private.

• Docs management, HR up innovation at NSW Parliament

  Automating manual document processing and HR administration has helped NSW Parliament foster a culture of innovation, without committing to large IT projects.

• SOA Grows Up -- and Out

  Not too long ago, IT organizations turned to service-oriented architecture primarily as a way to integrate enterprise applications. But now large companies are using SOA to create components that can be combined and reused as services across multiple applications.

• Recovery May Drive SOA

  Atul Saini, CEO and CTO of Fiorano Software, shares with CIO his vision for BPM and SOA for the Indian CIOs.

• SOA: Think Business Transformation, Not Code Reuse

  The worst CIO misunderstanding about service-oriented architecture (SOA) is thinking of it as only another technical initiative for software reuse. Although SOA's reuse potential is real and good, its business impact goes much further: In Forrester surveys, 38 percent of Global 2000 SOA users say they are using it for strategic business transformation. SOA's true source of power is in its business design models, not its technology - and this means that SOA provides a broad foundation for a much larger shift in business technology (BT) architecture that goes far beyond SOA itself. By correctly understanding SOA, CIOs can lead their organizations on a solid and well-managed path toward a strategic technology future and greater business value.

• 10 steps to SOA

  SOA is an idea, not a technology.

• Why traditional security doesn't work for SOA

  Many organizations are embracing SOA as a way to increase application flexibility, make integration more manageable, lower development costs, and better align technology systems to business processes. The appeal of SOA is that it divides an organization's IT infrastructure into services, each of which implements a business process consumable by users and services.

• SOA grows up -- and out

  Not too long ago, IT organizations turned to service-oriented architecture (SOA) primarily as a way to integrate enterprise applications. But now large companies are using SOA to create components that can be combined and reused as services across multiple applications.

• Cloud Computing: IT Operations Changes Are Mandatory

  Just before the holidays I had a really interesting conversation with my friend Bill Takacs, who works at Gear6. It is a company that offers memcached appliances, used in applications that have very high data loads that preclude using a database as the primary means of data access. He shared with me a common pattern he sees in companies that are heavy users of memcached, which, after some thought, I concluded offers a vision of the future of cloud computing operations.