IBM Eye

There’s a great podcast with Steve Garone, formerly the Chief Technical Strategist for Sun Microsystem’s Software Marketing organization discussing SOA trends, focusing on IBM and BEA specifically. If you’re interested in IBM and SOA it would be worth a listen on the way to work sometime. I’ve pulled out some quotes that I found most illustrative:

I think ultimately there is going to be a line between the platform that is an infrastructure component like an operating system or a database, and the SOA fabric and stack that goes above it is going to be blurred. We are starting to see that now in some other cases and the best one that I can think of is the acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat.
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That’s very interesting: the example of Red Hat acquiring JBoss, and the development and infrastructure platform becoming indistinguishable. Think about and pair that with where Microsoft has been coming from around service-oriented platform.

If you watch the big code and cross-platform vendors like IBM and Oracle, they try to walk this tightrope between — we’ve got this comprehensive set for SOA that’s going to make it really easy for you develop, deploy, manage, and govern your services-based implementation, but, by way, if you have a best-of-breed solution in-house, we can easily integrate that for you, and they will use an industry standard-based argument to make that point. End users really need to look carefully; just how easy and inexpensive is it to use that level of integration.

We are seeing this land grab, this race, for governance capabilities. So if you have two out of these three components — let’s say you have governance and runtime — you will be able to work with the best-of-breed approaches in design time. Governance becomes the large winner here, because it ties runtime back to design time. Hence, we’ve had a very fast series of acquisitions, and also announcements like the IBM Registry and Repository announcement this week, toward the governance play.
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The sooner you bring the governance into a coordinated methodological role with the development, the better your quality will be in a lifecycle

Who’s winning the race?

IBM certainly has done a lot to steal the thunder in terms of messaging around SOA. They have introduced a lot of products, acquired a lot of companies, and put together a what looks like a comprehensive solution. The “baggage” there, of course, is that a lot of this comes through legacy products that have to be brought up to date, up to speed, and relevant to SOA. The question for IBM is going to be just how well have they done that and I think the jury is still out on that. I have always been a fan of BEA, although they’ve always had challenges in terms of the platform issue I mentioned earlier, but also in terms of coming out of a very technology-based background and marketing itself better.

I think they are all doing a very good job in terms of filling out the platform. You positioned IBM earlier as introducing a registry-repository because everybody’s got to have one, and now they do as well. One of things that you brought up was HP. One of the things that is interesting to me, and I am going to be spending some significant amount of time on in the near future, is the Venn diagram overlap between SOA and the virtualization space.