sapienti sat: Making SOA Ready for the Enterprise

Sort of… I got e-mail from blogged congratulating me with the fact that this blog has beet evaluated by their editors and got 8.0 out of 10. It’s nice to be noticed and evaluated (especially if the marks are good). However before I let the euphoria get the better of me, it needs to be said that although sapienti sat shares the same category with Slashdot, we ended up number 743 on page 38… Only with the advent of Internet and search engines could the Top 10 lists evolve into the top 2,780:

A further humbling fact is that the Google ranking of the blogged home page is the same 5/10 as most posts in this blog and the inner pages have no ranking at all. According to the WayBackMachine the site in its current form is too young to be cached (less then 6 month old) so maybe they will soon get to the higher rankings – especially with the help of all those people whom they ranked… So thank you blogged, I appreciate the attention!

Like most people I like to get into things early, so for the last couple of year as the governance was moving towards the inflection point, we were brainstorming what would be the next big thing in SOA. And I am pretty sure it will have something to do with semantics. Don’t get me wrong I am not jumping on the bandwagon of semantic Web 3.0 whatever it means – it’s crowded enough there without me. I am talking about strictly about SOA. I see several things how SOA can get semantic and I touched on some of them in my blog: through meaningful service categorization, dynamic discovery and invocation and meaningful mediation. I remember after a two hour presentation about our SOA Governance solution, a customer asked me: “Ok, you have pretty much cornered the Quality of Service issues, but what about the Quality of Mediation?” I am still not sure what this means, but it sounds way cool!

In the spirit of this I have submitted a proposal to the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference which will take place in May in San Jose, California. If I am lucky, I might see you there.

Apparently, a global car manufacturer (one in whose cars it feels good to be seen) does. In the post that advocated delegated governance I provided many hypothetical examples illustrating why it might be needed and how it might be used in the enterprise SOA ecosystem. And some of the feedback I got since was along the lines: all this sounds interesting in theory, but have you ever seen an actual customer asking for any of this? And now I have – I just came across aforementioned requirements that are an exact match to one of the examples from that post. Do I need that kind of validation to know that my views about Life, the Universe, and Everything (including SOA Governance) are correct? I will not dignify this with an answer!

PS: And before the proverbial ink dried on this entry (read: feed readers considered it old news) I came across a second company with nearly identical requirements. This time it was a North American health insurance provider. And these are just the clients wanting to leverage their investment in Sun Access Manager to provide higher-level SOA Security capabilities. I think I will turn this one into a living document to track similar cases – please do drop me a note if you come across any more…

Just came across an interesting point of view on SOA Governance - as a means to avoid "Tragedy of the commons" that would otherwise inevitably result from the reuse of ungoverned services. Interesting concept [I actually had to look it up]. I guess this represents the other side of the coin for the responsible reuse concept that I have been using to promote governance to the business constituents. Probably worth a full post, this one - so stand by.

Last week one of the readers commented on the TOC entry and overall type of content that I have been publishing on this blog and suggested that a wiki (I did not even know Sun has a public wiki service) would be a more appropriate location for the non-transient content that I have been publishing. Thanks Jason! So let me cut the ribbon on the SOA Governance & Security wiki. For now it only has the TOC which points back at the posts here, but it's a start. Also the way I understand it, it should be open for everyone, so if you need help registering or some kind of approval - drop me a line and I'll try to help. Also for those within Sun if you want to publish on this blog, send me your ID and I will give you contributor access.