sapienti sat: Making SOA Ready for the Enterprise

How Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Governance reminded me of my first disaster movie.

I recently come across the latest (and as far as I know the first) Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance. This is definitely a good trend – I see this as recognition of the importance of Governance for the overall success of SOA and a statement that these technologies are important by themselves, not as a set of capabilities of an ESB or the SOA platform of your choice. In fact they specifically excluded a prominent SOA vendor, based on the fact that their Governance technologies are only intended for their own SOA suite. I have always maintained this point of view, perhaps in a less diplomatic manner: since no SOA vendor in their right mind (however cocky) can assume that the entire SOA ecosystem will consist only of services and composite applications built on their platform, and furthermore, all of those deployments will remain within a single domain of control (i.e. if both you and your trading partner use the same platform, they will allow you to connect your management console to their ESB – yeah, right!) governance capabilities built into such suits are useless beyond PoC or an initial pilot phase. The reasoning behind it is that if someone believes in the importance of SOA Governance they will not leave ungoverned services that are developed on different platforms, exposed out of packaged applications or provided by external entities, so they will have to also invest in a standalone governance technology to cover all of these. At which point they have to either live with two completely independent and most likely non-interoperable solutions of the same problem, or most likely stop using the built-in governance capability of their SOA platform and standardize on the universal solution. Point proven (I think).

I would also agree with their overall assessment that there is no clear leader in SOA Governance yet and that in most cases even if a vendor has all the areas of SOA Governance covered, it is done by a menagerie of products that came from different pedigrees and share little or no code and underlying architecture. Which makes me quite pleased with the decision we made three years ago to build SGF as a single suite, separate from Java CAPS (then known as ICAN), based on a uniform architecture and shared code… – Sorry, could not resist here

And now, getting back to the original subject of this post. Overall this report would have provided a fairly compelling and informative reading, if only I knew a little bit less about the topic and some of the vendors and products it covered. This reminded me of the film The Crew (Экипаж) which came out when I was in high school. It was the first soviet disaster film with all the trimmings: great (for the time) special effects, engaging plot, some character development and even a hint of erotica – unheard of in the era of late soviet Puritanism. The plot is about a crew of a soviet airliner, who land their plane in a foreign mountainous city called Bidri, which was damaged by an earthquake, which is then hit by another even stronger quake. Their jumbo jet is severely damages as they take of from the spectacularly disintegrating airport, and they crew repairs it in flight by exiting outside onto the fuselage through a stopped turbine. As you would expect, everything ends well. Everyone I know (myself included) loved this film. Except my English teacher, who went to see it with her husband a veteran airline pilot, who spoiled every suspenseful moment with his comments about accuracy and plausibility of things happening on the screen. I imagine the same would be true for an American taking a systems administrator to The Net or Firewall.

So, what does it all have to do with the Magic Quadrant? Well let’s see:

• One vendor did not provide in time information about the technologies they have, but they were still included and evaluated based on a product they did not have;
• Another vendor whose known weakness is that their product is completely self-contained and standalone got kudos for federation;
• An organization whose only public message on Governance is “use our consultants to teach you best practices” got into the “visionaries” crowd. My guess is that they were evaluated on the products they are planning to build, not the ones have right now.

I have been deliberately vague in the above statements for what I hope are obvious reasons, but if you are interested in more details, write to me and we could discuss things a bit further.

What does this all mean? Perhaps, just that I am not the right audience for these type of document, that’s all.

Post-Scriptum: couple of weeks after publishing this piece I have come across the entire Magic Quadrant in question available on the web. I hope it was done with permission and would not be taken off-line. Please read for yourselves.