John Michelsen

Lately we've done a lot of research and publishing on how Dev & QA teams can ensure better quality throughout the software development and release lifecycle. But what about the IT Operations guys? It seems we are encountering a disconnect between the Enterprise Architecture and Integration disciplines that are moving to SOA, and the people who need to monitor and maintain these systems in deployment. There are a lot of companies starting to focus on better SOA Governance, which includes the management of business processes and workflows, and the services and applications behind that. Great stuff happening on that side of the IT shop. However, often the actual running applications are still in the purview of IT Operations teams. Don't get me wrong, it is a great thing that we have a team that is manning Mission Control -- hopefully providing an impartial report and mon... (more)

Is SOA Dead, Doomed, or Misnamed?

Many in the media are already calling on the demise of SOA and saying that it's just a passing phase, or it's really just a rebrand of the EAI space, or that it will be segmented only to certain integration-type challenges. We have a bit of a different take. The term SOA will go away over the next several years but it will go the same route that e-commerce applications went. If you think back to the mid-'90s, we started talking about e-commerce as an architecture that was distinct from the then traditional enterprise architecture. However, over the past few years, e-commerce as a... (more)

Service Oriented Virtualization - Webinar & White Paper

We have been doing so much with Virtualization in this blog that I have wondered if you guys are getting tired of it, yet almost every comment I get in person and most of the press requests are around the virtualization concepts for SOA. And you know we've recently produced some new thinking on how to leverage all this with our Service Oriented Virtualization white paper and released major product enhancements to take advantage of these ideas called the LISA VSE (Virtual Services Environment). To help put this in context we are producing a webinar with Theresa Lanowitz. Theresa h... (more)

What Is SOA and Service-Oriented Virtualization?

Server virtualization provides an immediate reduction in hardware and configuration cost. But in focusing merely on the hardware side of virtualization, are we leaving money on the table? While organizations can reduce the number of boxes they need, and save the cost of replicating servers for virtual test beds, these servers are becoming commodities. What if we could apply the benefits of virtualization where we spend 80 percent or more of the IT budget – in the key enterprise software that runs our business and in the extensive development, support and maintenance costs o... (more)

European SOA: Ahead of the Curve?

I'm in Germany right now, looking forward to a session at ZapThink's Practical SOA in Frankfurt event tomorrow. I'll be joining some peers from companies like T-Mobile, Swisscom, Novartis and SwissLife who are going to be sharing their own SOA success stories. Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We've posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term "SOA" can polarize some IT teams - it's an "either/or" decision at the architectural level. Talking to our EMEA director, Wilfred, ... (more)