Transcript of Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition Podcast with Analysts Steve Garone and Neil Macehiter

Edited transcript of weekly BriefingsDirect[TM] SOA Insights Edition, recorded Oct. 6, 2006.

Listen to the podcast here.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the inaugural weekly BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition. This is a weekly discussion and dissection of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and related news and events with a panel of independent IT industry analysts and guests. I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions and your host and moderator. This week joining me on our panel is Steve Garone. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve Garone: Great to be here, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: Steve is a research partner affiliated with Ideas International, and is a former program vice president at IDC responsible for web services, integration, middleware, application development, and software-enabling technologies. He has also founded his own market research and analysis firm, The Align IT Group, which is now part of TechTarget. Steve is also an independent industry analyst and I'm told weíll hear more about your plans on that front and your future, Steve.

Garone: Yes, you will.

Gardner: Terrific. Also joining us is Neil Macehiter. Neil is the research director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton, based in England. Welcome to the show, Neil.

Neil Macehiter: Thanks, Dana. Nice to be here.

Gardner: Why don't you give me a quick rundown of your previous affiliations as an industry analyst?

Macehiter: Sure, before founding Macehiter Ward-Dutton at the beginning of 2005, I was a research director with a UK-based analyst company called Ovum, where I headed up a team of analysts looking at software infrastructure research. Before that I spent 17 years working for a variety of vendors and end-user organizations like Oracle, Sybase, Sun, and a few start ups.

Gardner: Excellent. Yes, I think we all have some background in software infrastructure and enterprise software. Before Interarbor Solutions I covered these subjects as well for the Yankee Group and the Aberdeen Group. So, just for the edification of our audience, we're creating a podcast show here that will include a transcript, and us prolific bloggers will be blogging on it as well.

The notion here is that the marketplace has some IT podcasts, we've got a lot of Web 2.0 and social networking discussion podcasts, but as far as I know, we don't have any SOA-focused shows. More and more SOA news, as well as trends, are emerging. This is not just a blip on the hype curve, although there is certainly some hype involved. This is a long-term (perhaps decades long) trend in IT. So, we're going to create our own podcast show on SOA and SOA governance and related subjects. We're going to have industry analysts joining the show as our panel contributors, and we're going to invite some guests; people that are newsmakers as well as other leaders in this emerging SOA space.

So, to start us off this week, there is some fairly big news from some of the biggest players in SOA: BEA, IBM, and Borland. We are going to start with an overview of what the BEA folks have done. I want to hand this off to Neil. I assume that you will look closely at the BEA 360 announcements that emerged from the BEA World Conference in California just in the last few days. Could you give us an overview of what BEA has come out with?

Macehiter: Yes, sure. What the BEA SOA 360 is, I think, is BEA putting a stake in the ground. They see their offerings around service-oriented infrastructure platforms evolving over the next two to three years. There are a number of aspects to it.

One is that they are applying SOA principles to the wave of actual architecture beyond the learning platform, and they refer to this as the micro services architecture. What this is really all about is providing enabling capabilities which are themselves delivered as services and exporting those within the overall platform. They talk about this as a notion of a service network which is actually nothing new in the SOA-based spenders like Blue Titan, which has been acquired by SOA Software. For example, they have been talking about the service network for a significant period of time. So, that's one element of this BEA SOA 360 announcement that really spans the three broad product families: the Tuxedo platform; WebLogic, which is an application platform for service-enabling applications; and AquaLogic, which is the micro-service platform they announced about a year-and-a-half ago.

They've also announced in this part of SOA 360 the WorkSpace 360. They are trying to facilitate a more collaborative approach to SOA that recognizes the roles of the different players in any SOA initiative. All the business analysts, the architects, developers, and the operation staff will be provided the means with which to collaborate. This is really oriented around their repository they acquired with Flashline which, to some extent, addresses the requirements.

I think are predominantly focusing on targeting a broader community with this notion of the WorkSpace. There are also a couple of other announcements. It is slightly tangential ... to the platform, some consulting offerings specifically oriented toward the executive community to develop a business case for SOA and to better understand the business value of SOA, and finally to offer some support services providing automated management capabilities so that you could, for example, detect a problem in the infrastructure and apply patches. It is that service that is really oriented around the infrastructure. That really captures the 360 announcements.

Gardner: I'd like to add something before you get into the analysis on this. Just a week before, BEA came out with something they're calling SALT 1.1, which stands for Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo. This is a Web services stack built on Tuxedo, their transaction processing engine, and allows the users to take C and C++ and COBOL, which are long-term and costly application sets to maintain, and allows them to work within a service oriented architecture framework. I think this has clearly targeted IBM and its installed base of CICS and Z Series -- its mainframes legacy -- allowing you to expose those via Tuxedo as Web services, although you have to inject Tuxedo into this stack.

Now that we've seen a little bit of what BEA is up to, let's talk about IBM. I'll give an overview of this announcement. IBM came out with a series of five new products, a number of enhancements to existing products, and 11 service offerings. They are really focusing on giving their customers flexible entry points into service-oriented architecture through a series of initiatives.

One of the things that is rather daunting about IBM is when they come out with these announcements, it is a laundry list of things and is somewhat of a challenge to fully wrap your mind around them, but they've broken it down to four major categories on the way you would build out your architecture. They call this model, assembly, deploy, manage, govern strategy, or MADMG, and it really amounts to having a services fabric. The lingo here is quite similar to what we heard from BEA.

This is a process management capability infrastructure, and management and then governance overlay to this series of capabilities. In terms of products, they've had the IBM Information Server, the WebSphere Business Services Fabric that we mentioned. And new and not entirely unexpected is their WebSphere Service Registry and Repository product, playing catch-up with the other companies that have done this either internally or through acquisition.

IBM also produced the Tivoli Dynamic Workload Broker and the IBM Change and Configuration Management Database. Those are the new products, and there were also enhancements to IBM's WebSphere Process Server, the Rational Platform and the Workplace Dashboard Framework. They have also come out with a number of services around methodology, and the flexibility and growth of reuse to decrease costs. So, governance links to a service lifecycle management capability focused on the high-level business services framework and BPM, and then also to the underlying infrastructure, and the way to manage that.

Steve, now that Neil and I have gone over with BEA and IBM, two very big players in SOA, have come out with. From your vantage point, have they done a good job providing a "soup to nuts" or a holistic full-service SOA implementation? Or are we still looking at even the definition of what that would consist of? Do we have big holes here or are we almost complete?

Garone: Before I answer the question, let me just throw in one more little element of the IBM announcement which I don't believe you mentioned, and that is they put a lot of emphasis on business partners and on industry solutions.

Gardner: Sure.

Garone: It has always been very important for IBM to take a lead in that area or at least try to, and part of that comes from their recent acquisition of Webify. But it's part of this overall effort on the part of both vendors and other vendors to ease that transition into SOA. This specific case, looking at how to make specific industries with specific requirements with compliance issues, to make that transition easier. So, I just wanted to throw that in there.

Gardner: Absolutely.

Garone: Well, in order to answer your question, I'd like to step back for a moment and frame this in the concept of what I have traditionally called the platform. My definition of platform is a little bit different from what BEA and even IBM would say. To me, a platform is a piece of technology or functionality around which a vendor builds its community. So, for IBM it would be operating systems and hardware platforms, and for Oracle it would be their database.

The importance of understanding this is really two-fold: The first is from the adoption and sales perspective. Vendors tend to have people gravitate toward them for a solution because their infrastructure and their solutions are built on a major component or a platform that a particular vendor offers. Also, do you go best-of-breed or do you just say I've got an IBM-centric environment, Iíve got an Oracle-centric environment; I am just going to go with them for the solution?

Gardner: Yes, I think this is the big question we are now facing.

Garone: Right.

Gardner: Complete holistic, or best-of-breed -- and if you want to do both, how do you decide where to put what where?

Garone: Exactly, and in the case of BEA, they have been very strong over the last few years building a comprehensive SOA platform, either through its own development initiatives or through acquisitions.

Gardner: Right.

Garone: They have a very strong foundation and legacy in providing very good, if not the best, solutions for middleware and SOA from the technology perspective with any vendor of the industry. That is one of the ways BEA has been very successful and has overcome the platform tendency of people to gravitate toward the wrong platform and go to those vendors. BEA has been successful in fighting that because if you go with my definition of a platform, BEA does not have a platform. It is building what it calls a platform around SOA, but that's basically what it does.

Gardner: Well, doesn't SOA require a bit of a change in that definition of platform? We have design time and runtime issues, and then we have this governance or management that binds the two because of the unpredictable nature of SLAs and demands on these services in an open environment, and the ability for reuse. We are really tying together runtime and design time and the management, and then reinforcing the cycle of the feedback loop among these components. It looks different than the traditional notion of a platform.

Garone: Yes, it is, and that's where I was going with the conversation. 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.

Gardner: Right.

Garone: In this case, an open source platform that is going to incorporate the operating system components required to do SOA and the SOA stack itself, and you're not going to be able to tell the difference. That is ultimately where IBM has to go and that may put BEA at a disadvantage because it doesn't have those underlined components, it has to sit on top of someone else's.

Gardner: Okay. Let's go to Neil. Do you see this definition of platform? We have design time, runtime, and governance capabilities, among others. Do you see BEA and IBM approaching it that way? Are there major holes, and can we expect that the implementations of SOA will cherry-pick among these parts, or will they be forced to go holistic with one because there are very limited number of vendors?

Macehiter: I think BEA and IBM are definitely moving in that direction, and the reason the platform has to change is down to the notion of the service of service-oriented architecture. Service in the real world is something you experience, and in the IT terms and IT service it means the platform needs to extend from the development of the services to their deployment to their operation, and that changes the characteristics and the capability you need within the platform.

I think they are trying to move in that direction and, depending on where they are coming from, they have different strengths. IBM has strengths ... and capabilities you need from the development side. BEA has a slightly different emphasis and tends to focus more on the development and deployment, but undoubtedly we are trying to move in that direction.

The point that Steve raised was 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.

Gardner: That's a great point.

Macehiter: You know, .NET has distinguished Microsoft's historical struggle because people want to know where the applications server is, and the reply is that it is Windows; people would look blankly and say that is not an application server, but that's the way Microsoft has been pushing it. I definitely think that they have all moved in that direction.

The second point is will it be better to be best-of-breed or will people gravitate to particular dominant platforms? I think the jury is still out on that. It entirely depends on the scope of an organization's SOA ambitions. For example, if they're looking to address some particular project-level server requirements, all departmental solutions and departmental requirements, and they are adopting a SOA approach, they might as well turn to a best-of-breed vendor.

Vendors like Sonic or SOA Software have been quite successful. When organizations start to consider more enterprise initiatives, who are they going to turn to? I think their natural inclination is going to be to gravitate to the big players and then look for the gaps. There are undoubtedly gaps; for example, products of the IBM announcement. Organizations would be looking for a combination of IBM and a Systinet (Now Mercury and HP) to provide registry and repository. Similarly, they will be looking at the BEA offering and looking for gaps there. How well do those BEA [products manage] identity and security? Well, only to a certain extent, so again they're going have to look for best-of-breed capabilities there.

The enterprises will gravitate to the big platform providers and then plug the gaps with best-of-breed capabilities. We will not see this sort of wholesale method of the best-of-breed solutions to implement, to support our SOA initiatives. If you are doing it at enterprise scale, potentially there are quite significant risks. The organizations will fight, plus many organizations are grappling with their sourcing strategies and looking to consolidate suppliers. If you have a massive, significant investment in SAP or ERP backbone, it is likely that you're going to at least consider SAP NetWeaver as part of the solution, and look at plugging the gaps that exist in NetWeaver around things like governance and identity and security.

Garone: If I can just interject something here, Neil. Your point about NetWeaver is well-taken, and if you could turn the original model I talked about, and say that for those people the SAP applications are the platform, that gives a lot more clarity to the notion of platform I originally presented. You are absolutely right; 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.

Macehiter: Absolutely. Oracle has been working with the idea of whole pluggable and BEA probably as micro service. The architectural announcement was the blended approach that BEA has been adopting primarily around the development platform.

Garone: Although that's mostly centered on open source.

Macehiter: Indeed. I think if you know how blendable or how pluggable or just luke-warm pluggable .... You know there are some important questions to ask because itís not just about having a list of WS.* specifications. You know we can interoperate with those things. It is how well the governance capabilities you have within your platform and to exploit them; can you manage those plugged-in components in the same way that you manage the rest of the infrastructure? There are a lot of other questions you need to be ask.

Gardner: I'm developing an analysis of this I'd like to run by you. When it comes to deciding between best-of-breed and holistic-integrated stack -- and I agree that there are going to be cases where an installed base is going to have an influence on decision making. For example, if you are a big Oracle shop, if you are a big SAP shop, if you are a big Microsoft shop, those have implications on your decisions and strategy.

On a more general note, it seems that developers are really not going to give up on their need for best-of-breed. They like to cherry-pick their tools, they are increasingly involved with Eclipse, they like the idea of plug-ins. Shoving a new tool down the developer's throat is not going to work.

I'm developing this analysis that says best-of-breed is going to continue; in fact, it needs to be absolutely supported in the design-time phase and test-and-debug phase and those early lifecycle quality issues for SOA. But, when it comes to deployment, there is this move in the market for unification, for consolidation, for lowering total cost, reducing the number of data centers, modernizing your all legacy applications, taking advantage of Web services standards, moving toward SOA.

It seems it is in the runtime, the operations side, where there's that need for a single throat to choke -- this is where a large vendor can be there on a services support and maintenance capability front where it also has big ecology partners and a support infrastructure. That's where you need a single large vendor. But then there is the third component of the platform that we described for SOA, which is this governance and policy, which needs to be relayed back to the design time efforts.

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. Does that make sense to you all?

Garone: Yes. I think your analysis makes sense. I think you said that if you have the governance in runtime, then you will be able to accommodate the development side and the best-of-breed on that side. Well, there are a couple of things that I'd like to say about it. It is basically sound; the only thing I would say is the openness in terms of the governance in runtime is going to be a requirement. They are not going to be nice to have and they are not going to be something that allows you to do something. It's something that is going to be an absolute requirement in the eyes of users.

Gardner: I absolutely agree with that. The sooner you bring the governance into a coordinated methodological role with the development, the better your quality will be in a lifecycle rather than just developing and then throwing over the wall and hoping that deployment people can work with that. I absolutely agree.

Garone: Yes. I just want to mention quickly that the actions over the last four or five years of the major vendors we talked about earlier in terms of reaching out to developers, making all their tools and development environments validates that the developer is the one you have to make happy on the development and deployment side. They are all reaching out to do that. The vendors are actually attempting to not only put a full core press on in terms of bringing in developers, but they are also trying to impress those developers so they think they are buying best-of-breed when they buy from an IBM or Oracle.

Gardner: Right. How about you, Neil? How do you see this view I've provided?

Macehiter: Though I think your analysis is on-point, I would emphasize that the organizations need to be thinking about governance more broadly than many of the vendors have been promoting. [Governance has been] primarily focused on the development ... side, and to some extent paying lip service to the fact that those governance assets -- the assets you have in your registry-repository -- need to be exploited throughout the entire lifecycle.

This is why the acquisition of Systinet by Mercury and then subsequently by HP is quite interesting. And thinking about the gap that needs to be plugged there. For example, how does SOA registry-repository compare to a configuration management database (CMDB), which is at the heart of their management and monitoring capabilities? I absolutely agree with the analysis in terms of interoperability that is needed from the development side, but I think you equally need interoperability at the management and runtime because it goes back to this point: A service is something you experience. You don't actually experience the service when it's being developed and deployed. You experience it when it's being run and operated.

That is the other angle of governance that we need to highlight. It was interesting, for example, when IBM announced the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository product that they did not talk too much about the integration, and how activity assets, activity complexity, and application manager are going to be exploited.

Gardner: All right, now let's get to some of the blogs that went back and forth this week. You and I were in it, Neil. Some folks were saying, and I believe were playing off of recent analyst reports, that Oracle and SAP will also be shopping for registry-repository product -- only there doesn't seem to be too many of those proven vendors left.

I wrote that I thought Oracle and SAP would be more likely look to a home-grown effort, and that Oracle and SAP are probably well on their way to producing a registry-repository, or a governance capability, internally because it does need to play off of their previous or existing management, as well as their strengths and their logic and policy approaches. Now we can swing the conversation into the vendor politics, or vendor sports, side of things. Who is the demonstrating a top-ranked approach?

It seems that IBM and Microsoft are doing quite well, although that is closely tied to installed bases. We are seeing some action around these other players that are still putting together comprehensive SOA platforms. Neil, you mentioned earlier Red Hat-JBoss, and then the Mercury acquisition by HP. It seems to me that HP is coming into this rather aggressively because it has a large management capability with OpenView. It's adding on the quality assurance benefits in the early phase of the design time with the Mercury traditional products, and then with the governance from the Systinet part of Mercury. And then also there's a very close relationship (that doesn't get a lot of attention) between Red Hat-JBoss and HP. They become, in a sense, an open source software platform.

So, here's an open-ended question: Who's ahead in the SOA race here, and who is not doing so well in terms of putting this all together?

Garone: Well, I'll jump in. It is very difficult to say who is ahead. As an ex-IDC analyst, I tend to think of those things in terms of who produced the most revenue in a given year on SOA-related products, which, of course, always seems to exclude Microsoft, for the reasons that Neil stated earlier. But I don't think that's the right way to look at it -- in terms of revenue.

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.

It popped into my head because you mentioned HP. HP, as we all know, left the middleware business a couple of years ago, so its relationship with Red Hat and JBoss (now that Red Hat has acquired JBoss) makes perfect sense in terms of filling that in. But when you combine the governance issues and the other issues around building and managing SOA -- and put it in the context of being able to virtualize assets, and therefore where services are deployed and how they are managed -- that gets to be an interesting problem, and one that both IBM and HP are going to be fairly well-positioned to be able to solve.

Gardner: I guess I should also toss out for the sake of our audience that the stakes here are enormous. Larry Ellison made a prescient observation a few years ago that there is only going to be three or four major IT vendors at the end of the day, in 10 years or so. I agree with that. There is going to be a fomenting level of small companies that are innovative, but when it comes to the large enterprise accounts, there is going to be a consolidation. At the same time, there are these large transitions to services in the architecture. The companies that nail this are in a position to have the continuance of their $20 billion to $80 billion a year revenue engines. For over a long period of time we're talking about a global market potential here of $40 billion to $60 billion a year when it comes to the full implementation of service oriented architecture. So the stakes here are enormous.

Neil, let's go back to you for one more take on ranking the big guys, and how they are doing.

Macehiter: I think, you know, I tend to agree with Steve. IBM has certainly done a good job of winning the mind share in terms of being perceived as a SOA leader, and has done a lot of work to promote the customer engagements it has had. On paper, it certainly has a lot of the components you need for a comprehensive SOA capability, and I use the word capability because of the services element, which I think is important to know. In fact, BEA made some specific announcements around services and ...

Gardner: You mean professional services?

Macehiter: Yes, consulting services.

Gardner: Right.

Macehiter: So, I think IBM has done a good job. Microsoft is out there really addressing a slightly different audience and building from a different point of strength, which is out from its developer community.

With Oracle there is still some confusion around Fusion, especially for their applications and middleware strategy. They have actually done a pretty good job of building out their portfolio to address a broad set of the requirements. Perhaps some management pieces are missing. They have made some very small acquisitions. I think SAP is building from its point of strength around control of the business processes, and working at a high-level within the organization. It doesn't have so much of the core infrastructure capabilities you need.

So, I think it's interesting to watch the dynamic. A lot of it depends on the comparative strengths of the vendors historically. I think there is a tier of players below that like webMethods, SOA Software, Progress-Sonic that, if you like the known big vendor alternative, I think will primarily appeal initially around this whole project level deployment. I think it's an interesting space.

Gardner: If we look at those second tier players through this taxonomy of best-of-breed in design time, completeness in run time, and then linking that together with governance and policy -- how do you see those second tier players being able to operate within that sort of framework?

Macehiter: They had seen some initial success, which is not unusual in an emerging market. But it is more about addressing the customer concerns around viability, around the longevity of that vendor. Are they going to be around? Do they have the vertical market expertise? It is going to be interesting as these markets evolve and you see the tier-one players gradually emerge as they did with client/server and client/server development tools. They gradually subsumed the mind share there, and there were a small number of players left.

Gardner: Yes, we saw the same thing with distributed Java.

Macehiter: Exactly, I think that it will be the same. This will probably allow for one of those mid-size players to really have a significant play, not at the same level as the big players, but to be recognized. You can see the companies I've mentioned, SOA Software, Progress, webMethods all vying for that place.

Gardner: Yes, another announcement this week was from Borland Software. They came out with their Lifecycle Quality Management (LQM) solution, which is a series of suites really, focused primarily on design time but with implications for working on an open basis with governance and policy. I wanted to bring that up because this has cast a new light on Borland, particularly when HP bought Mercury. Having this design time quality assurance capability, all a sudden, is much more prominent in SOA. Even though we might not put Borland in the category of a second-tier SOA provider, I think we can look at them now with more interest as a best-of-breed player within SOA nonetheless.

Garone: Yes, I think that makes sense, Dana. You know if I look at the announcement and I look at what Borland has done here. It is something that is obviously needed and necessary, and plays well in the context of a governance model. It also makes sense for Borland, given the kind of vendor they are and what their history has been. It really builds on this notation of giving developers what they need to build effective solutions but not only bringing it all the way through the entire development lifecycle in terms of quality assurance, but also bringing things back all the way and bringing the notion of governance and quality back to the requirements themselves.

Gardner: Yes, right.

Garone: I think that's really a very positive thing for Borland to do. It was probably something Borland needed to do, given the fact that everybody around them is building comprehensive SOA stacks. We all remember five or six years ago they were playing to the middleware space, which didn't go very well. So, this makes sense. There is somebody to watch. My sense is that the result from this is less a move into other areas of comprehensive stacks, and more in terms of partnerships and relationships with other vendors.

Gardner: Okay, gentlemen, I really appreciate your frankness and insights. I think we've had a really nice discussion.

As part of the BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition format we're going to do something different than you might get from your traditional IT industry analyst. We are going to have a little pause for disclosure here. It will be interesting to know who, for transparency purposes, we are working with on a revenue basis. I'll go first. We've mentioned a number of companies during this discussion, but I just want our listeners to know that I have a business relationship, in fact a sponsorship for my BriefingsDirect podcasts, with Borland, HP, Cape Clear and Eclipse Foundation.

So just to come clean, I wonder if you other guys want to mention the companies that you work with as well, so people better trust us.

Macehiter: Yes, I'll just quickly dive in here. In terms of the vendors that I've mentioned off the top of my head, once we had consulting engagements with and a revenue relationship with BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Systinet and Mercury.

Garone: Of the ones we've talked about today, the only two are IBM and HP.

Gardner: Terrific. Okay, I would also like to point out to our listeners that if you'd like to learn more about BriefingsDirect B2B informational podcasts or to become a sponsor of this or other B2B podcasts, feel free to contact me, Dana Gardner, at 603-528-2435.

I want to thank our panelists today. We have been discussing service oriented architecture and the SOA news of the week with Steve Garone. He is a research partner affiliated with Ideas International, a former IDC vice president, a founder of the Align IT Group, and is now an independent industry analyst working toward some other interesting goals. I hope youíll come back soon to tell us about them, Steve.

Garone: You can count on it.

Gardner: Thank you. We've also been talking with Neil Macehiter. He is the research director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton, an analysis and consulting firm in England. Thank you, Neil.

Macehiter: You are welcome, and thanks a lot, Dana. Thanks Steve.

Garone: Thank you.

Gardner: So, let me remind our listeners to come back again next week for another version of BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition. Thanks.

Listen to the podcast here.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2006. All rights reserved.