sapienti sat: Making SOA Ready for the Enterprise

An insight into the obvious

I recently gave an in-house presentation with the same title, which boiled down to the following reasons:

• A recognized must-have for any SOA initiative today – when I started “selling” SOA Governance three years ago, I had to dedicate a good third of my time to proving that it is important and explaining what might happen to SOA implementations if were to be neglected. That part has been steadily shrinking with time and in the last year most audiences asked me to skip it altogether.
• Included in almost every RFI/RFP – even if the word “Governance” is not mentioned there (which is becoming less and less frequent these days) the underlying concepts, like security, monitoring, throttling, QoS, compliance, etc are found in the majority of requests that have anything to do with SOA: ESB, integration, B2B, composite applications, BPM and are creeping into even tangential subjects like Master Data Management.
• Customers keep asking for advice and position – it is harder and harder to come across at true greenfield environment or a virgin customer when it comes to SOA. So instead of delivering 101 classes and telling people to build their SOA our way, we have to deal with issues that have arisen while our customers were building their SOA Ecosystems their (or our competitors’) way. And in my experience they often tend to gravitate towards Governance (or the lack of such).
• Entry point into unassailable accounts – I once took part in a meeting with a global Systems Integrator aimed at devising a joint go-to-market strategy and observed that the SI’s marketing folks were much more interested in the Governance part then the rest of the SOA stack combined. When asked why, they explained that very often they find themselves facing a CIO who several years ago had standardized on a competitive (let’s for argument’s sake say: Tibco) platform, and just approved an additional multi-million dollar investment into that technology. If they start pushing our story (read: platform), then, regardless of the actual merits of the technologies involved, the most likely outcome would be an abrupt end of the audience and likely long-term loss of credibility. If, on the other hand, they congratulate the CIO on a wise decision and carefully steer the conversation towards Governance, they are much more likely to increase their credibility and establish an important beachhead. I personally have successfully employed this strategy on a number of otherwise hopeless accounts.
• Crown Jewel of SOA – this is another (less sales-centric but perhaps as cynical) way of looking at the above argument. An SOA implementation would never be complete without the keystone of Governance installed into it. This parallel is especially appropriate because Governance usually sits at the top (amongst the blocks on the 100,000 feet view architectural diagram – which is the only picture that really important people are likely to see) and because, unfortunately, it is often installed at the very last moment. On a more serious note, I have long maintained that Governance in the defining characteristic of SOA, because it is ultimately what will allow it to deliver on its original promise(s) and succeed where other technologically-similar approaches did not. So as far as the perceptions go, once you installed you Governance centerpiece at the top, it almost doesn’t matter whose technology is doing all the work at the bottom.
• Powerful differentiator – this one is fairly obvious as it not only separates those who have from those who have not, but highlights the completeness and cohesion of the entire SOA stack. Companies that deliberately built an SOA platform are much more likely to have a native solution then those trying to repurpose technologies from another domain.
• Reputation to uphold – through the SeeBeyond pedigree, we have a reputation of innovation and thought leadership in the SOA arena. Customers come to us not just for our products, but also seeking advice, guidance and vision. Many of our Service Offerings related to SOA aim at helping clients to transition further along the SOA maturity curve, which (as I hopefully proved above and by this entire blog) requires to have Governance in the picture.
• Because we can!

So what is the point of all those profound revelations? To me is to answer the question: is it worth the time and money for someone who is not a recognized player in the governance space to attempt becoming one? Especially if that someone is a recognized player in SOA as a whole. The anecdotal evidence seems to point to “yes”: for the past few months Tibco was actively advertising for Governance experts on various job sites, and the query for non-blog entries on microsof.com which until less then a year ago returned just a single paragraph about AmberPoint partnership, today yields respectable 376 distinct entries.

My take on this is: it depends on how one looks at SOA Governance. Which is the topic of my upcoming post.