Transcript of BriefingsDirect Podcast on Media Delivery Trends with Akamai CTO Mike Afergan

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM] podcast with Dana Gardner, recorded Nov. 7, 2006.

Podcast sponsor: Akamai Technologies.

Listen to the podcast here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today a discussion around the massive shift on the Internet to media delivery. There has been an explosion in user-generated content, in media and entertainment companies, as well as vendors of software and software services companies delivering client packages -- an increase in the entire software eco-system.

Mike Afergan is here to help us sort through some of the issues inherent in this avalanche of content -- data packets -- crossing the Internet. Mike is a chief technology officer at Akamai Technologies. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Mike Afergan: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We are seeing a different type of content distribution need. As a technology organization that is been working for a number of years at managing this -- both for end-user benefits as well as for those distributing content -- can you help us understand what is different now at the end of 2006 in terms of content, large files, and objects? What is different from just a few years ago?

Afergan: Sure, that is a great question. We’ve definitely seen a dramatic transformation over the past several years in terms of what our consumers -- you and I and, of course, businesses -- are doing daily online. Certainly, within the past year or two we had an inflection point in terms of adoption.

A number of different things are driving that. On one hand, you have a number of technology trends. Certainly one of the most significant is broadband adoption, both in the number of households and businesses that are connected online through broadband on a daily basis, as well as in terms of what broadband means to people today.

Business approaches to using this content has powerfully transformed sites from merely a Website to an online extension of their regular business -- if not an online business in itself. For example, in the media space we see several businesses formed around pay-per-content models, ad-supporting models, and syndication models. In the software space we see companies using the online channel as a primary way to deliver their content. The technology challenges get really exciting with the companies that have real online businesses and are enabling that business online.

Gardner: I suppose it was no surprise to forecast five or 10 years ago that we would be in the broadband world. People expected that you were going to give more broadband to more homes and businesses. But I guess what wasn’t anticipated were these new social phenomena in business models. I’m thinking about Web 2.0 companies, social networking, and people sharing massive files, their photos, and high-definition video clips.

Is this where we have caught the businesses by surprise?

Afergan: It caught some people by surprise. Obviously, a few years ago we saw broadband adoption happening at an accelerated rate. Nobody could predict the exact date we would hit that inflection point or exactly how fast it was going to happen. But certainly people saw that it was definitely happening over time, and the question was exactly which model, exactly which approach, exactly which pieces of new technology would really help it to hit that inflection point? Those certainly are the questions we are just beginning to uncover today.

There are many companies with successful online businesses today. For example, there are premium brand websites where you can get an online subscription. There is the CBS March Madness [basketball series], which has an ad-supported base model and had 400,000 simultaneous video streams. But truthfully many companies are still trying to figure out what the most profitable and successful model is going to be.

Take, for example, syndication, which is a very hot topic right now. This is an area where the business models and technologies are still sorting themselves out. So there are constant surprises and a constant evolution here. That is what keeps this exciting, and very interesting -- and explosive.

Gardner: We are seeing the page-view model with advertising being increasingly important. We’re seeing folks like Apple pioneering with a direct sales model with iTunes for music, where you just buy content via a download of a song -- and increasingly movies, video, and television.

We are expecting more of that from Microsoft with its XBox and Media Center. What are the technology requirements now that we are into these different content-delivery business models? I suppose what is common is that more bits are coming down the pipe. Is this an issue of scale? Is it an issue of measuring revenue? Is it an issue of cutting costs? Is there a need for better metrics? What are the technical requirements that are different now from what we forecast just a few years ago?

Afergan: Fortunately and unfortunately it is all of the above. There are many different challenges to realizing online businesses. I talked about pay-for content, for example, or ad-supported content or syndication. The business models themselves are complicated. Realizing them requires overcoming several technical obstacles.

Take, for example, a site like Major League Baseball. There are many challenges, as in any site that wants to have an online pay-per-content model where you are logging in to a subscription. The challenge is to make sure that only the people who pay for the content receive the content.

You need to worry about making sure that certain games are going to be blacked out in certain geographies. You are going to need to worry about controlling and having a rich interactive dynamic website. So there are many challenges around the business applications and logic, let alone the reporting and the monitoring and understanding your traffic, as well as the user events that happen at your site after the events.

Delivery is obviously a big challenge. Another is: How do you deliver the increasingly high-definition video streams, asynchronous transactions, and lots of small images on a user-generated site? How do you deliver all of this content in a reliable, scalable way?

These companies are evolving; they are facing many challenges, both fortunately and unfortunately, in a number of different areas. The real key theme is the logic and the tools it takes to enable that online business and the sophisticated business logic required to have such an online business.

A large part of that is making sure you have the rich interactive high-quality experience for your user because, ultimately, that is what makes it engaging, what makes people come back to your site and makes people click on more pages, more ads, more video, and more information. At the end of the day, that is what allows you to have your online business.

Doing that on the Internet has many challenges. How do you distribute that information through the Internet, which isn't designed fundamentally to handle the notion of a TV broadcast? You can’t show up at a data center and say, “Hi, I’d like to buy 50GB a second of traffic,” let alone thousands of gigabytes a second of traffic.

That does not work, and is not how the Internet was designed. A large part of what we do for our customers at Akamai is to not only give them the tools that enable sophisticated online business logic to do the targeting and the rights management, but also to provide the underlying platform that allows them to do scalable content distribution, which really is impossible using the bare metal of the Internet.

Gardner: One of the other associated trends here is that more and more types of organizations are becoming publishers. Companies and even individuals are becoming media distribution originators. We now have what is known as micromedia companies.

We now have everything from an individual to a Fortune 500 company getting into the act of creating content, distributing content, having a direct relationship either with their other businesses, ecology partners, or end users or other businesses as clients and customers. They do not want to get into the business of inventing the wheel once again for this sort of network services-level activity.

So it certainly sounds like a need for a de facto standard for a platform on the network for doing this?

Afergan: That is definitely a legitimate concern because the other problem that you did not mention is that while they are doing it, all of their competitors are also trying to do that and be more innovative. So our customers come to us to focus on what makes them innovative with their business model. They are looking for a platform that allows them to do that -- not building on the bare metal of the Internet but delivering more functionality with a platform that allows them to worry about enhancing business logic, new partnerships, and so on.

There are a couple of trends here. One is the disassembly of websites. We have many sites that are now syndicating their content out, allowing their videos to be delivered on other video sites, allowing their content to be incorporated in other sites. And to do that requires a couple of different pieces. One is the ability to deliver that content, and another is to have sophisticated business logic that allows you to determine who, what, where, and when your content is available. A lot of customers turn to Akamai for that increase in business logic and personalization that runs on top of our platform.

The other area you touched upon -- user-generated content -- is a massive concern for many customers. The customer needs to have rapid affinity to your site. We see that for the social networkers as well as the brands now trying to incorporate community aspects into their site.

In the past year Akamai has not just enabled the delivery of content from our storage to our servers and to the end users. More and more for our customers we are also handling the upload of end users' content through the Akamai end servers to our storage environment. That allows companies to build explosive, innovative, and interesting new business models without building any infrastructure. The customer wants us to worry not only about the content delivery and what is updated on their site. They also, frankly, want us to manage the content aggregation from the user-generated perspective.

Gardner: I see. So they not only need to worry about everyone simultaneously hitting on their servers to get a download, but as a media company they need to start attracting entertainment, as a social networking company, and so they need to think about everybody showing up at their door at the same time with a 5GB video file, right?

Afergan: Yes, so you need to worry about content heading in both directions. Frankly just the sheer scale of it -- the amount of people coming to you to deliver content, the size of your library and how that grows, and how much content you are going to need to worry about, manage, and control.

Gardner: You mentioned that we are not just talking about the movement or the management of these files; we are really talking about managing the relationships. We are talking about federating this content, aggregating it, deciding who can see it and under which circumstances, and what is freely available.

This involves a platform of some kind for gathering metrics, a billing or a transactional platform of some sort. And that becomes a logic issue, not just an infrastructure issue.

Afergan: Exactly. For more and more of our customers it is about enabling their online businesses. They are coming to Akamai to acquire those tools and logic. With our system any customer gains a configuration that basically specifies their requests, how we handle, how we process, and what logic we run for those various transactions.

Those are the tools that we built up over the years. We essentially provide applications for our customers to build on. It is not enough to simply have content in your site or to put content on other folks' sites. You need to worry about your authentication system, your advertising targeting system, as well as your reporting system. And that is what Akamai is doing for our customers.

An example is in the media space and the commerce space, where there is much more content going around -- but also much more business logic wrapping around that content.

Gardner: When we think about business logic, we usually think about developers. I suppose there is another trend afoot in the marketplace around accessing applications as services, something we call SOA and Web services, and also seeking out infrastructure as services, or services oriented infrastructure (SOI). There are a host of things going on there with virtualization and grid and utility.

Now, without going down that particular grid avenue at this time, what do we have here for developers? Should they be thinking about these issues or should they be going for services that they can access and integrate into their logic that provides a business model, an innovation, for their businesses or their hosting organization?

Afergan: Services are a powerful paradigm and tool that companies and developers can use to develop extensible applications. All the things that I spoke about before in terms of syndicating content and replacing functionality to other sites are generally available through an API-like interface, some sort of SOA.

These architectures are interesting and challenging because they typically flow over the Web, and small connections exchange these pieces of information when there is a request. That is a very challenging type of workload for a Web infrastructure -- where you have packet loss and increased latency, etc.

That information is exposed to different sites through APIs and various SOA or other XML-based or HTTP-type interfaces. So certainly the notion of exposing more of a service is something we are likely to see much more of over the coming years.

Of course, over the public Internet these services definitely have a lot of small HTTP connections, which means that they are chatty and do have to deal with the fragility that is exposed via TCP. There is a challenge from a quality of service perspective that needs to be overcome, but at the same time it does provide for a great deal of functional flexibility.

Gardner: So you need to build an attractive platform of services to address the new business models. And there is also an increasing set of developers using rich applications, AJAX front ends, or who are looking at SOA. Should we expect something from Akamai with a bit more interest to developers?

Afergan: We certainly hope that our service offerings today are very interesting to developers. Our approach has been, and will continue to be, to service the needs of our business customers. Akamai will not be offering developer software per se, but I think you will see us offering functionality that is important for the more sophisticated applications of our customers.

We will also be offering tools and ways for the developers within our customers to better interface with Akamai. At the same time, part of our approach is to be transparent, behind the scenes. We want to allow the customer to write Web services that are most natural for their business, and then allow it to run over the Internet without concern about the Internet quality-of-service, the vagaries of TCP, or what networks are now connected to.

Essentially all they do is make one small change in DNS, work with us to make sure they’re happy with their configuration, and then write the applications just the way they want to.

Gardner: When your customers come to you is there a different technical dialog now than a few years ago? Do you have another level of technical capability that you are bringing to them?

I know you had a lot of software vendors, for example, who are customers, who wanted to distribute their software products, their patches, and updates and so forth over the Internet. You have met those needs, but you are probably dealing with a different type of company now. Tell me a little bit about this sort of technical problem and solution set that the market is demanding right now.

Afergan: Sure. Clearly our customers, just like Akamai, have evolved significantly over the past several years. One of the exciting things for us is to work with these customers on their future projects. So often we’re in situations with our customers thinking about what they’re going to be doing a year or even five years out from the current timeframe. It is exciting for us to see these trends and to hopefully be out in front of these trends by the time they actually are relevant and required as we build up trusted relationships across the industry.

Online businesses are really the key that is driving what our customers are building -- not just putting content online, but putting sophisticated applications online. Our customers are asking us for the ability to have a high level of sophistication in their application, as well as high level of scale.

So not only are they coming to us asking us to move from 100K to 300K to 500K to 1.5MBit streams, but they want to make sure that when they do that, we are going to tie in with their J2EE applications, that in turn is tied into their user authentication system, which in turn is tied into their reporting system, which -- by the way, also has to work with two or three other third-party technologies that they want to support as part of their infrastructure.

It is generally a much more sophisticated application and developer that we’re working with. And what is great for both of us is that we are working with a more sophisticated business model.

Gardner: So you are much more of an ecology hub here, pulling a lot of different parts together to bring about a business solution.

Afergan: Often we won’t be the one pulling all the parties together in terms of a business perspective; that is not our business approach. But often our professional service organization working with the customers will be interacting with the other third parties, and some are already customers of Akamai.

So from the technology perspective, many of those technologies are running on the Akamai platform and working with each other, with us, and with the customer.

Gardner: Maybe you could give us a sense, Mike, of some of the return on investment (ROI) or some of the other metrics of success here. When we are dealing with such vast amounts of content, and people in the business are shifting as they evaluate different approaches to this, what would you tell them is in their best interest in terms of the cost and capability?

Afergan: Sure. We have been able to develop support across a variety of different business models, and have seen many different successes. For example, in the media a well-known Akamai customer such as Apple iTunes fundamentally changed the music landscape. It has over a billion downloads of music, similar to a pay-per-view content approach.

Another example is Major League Baseball. We support over 250 live games per month during the baseball season, with a variety of subscription-based approaches.

Another case is Akamai customer Friendster, in the social networking space. By coming onto the Akamai platform, not only do they save infrastructure cost but they were able to triple their market share in terms of page views -- which in the advertising space, in the social networking world, that immediately translates into revenue for them, with more and more page views.

A great high-tech example is Microsoft who, for their beta release of the Windows Vista software release, did more than 80GB per second of traffic -- one of the largest sustained volumes in the history of the Internet. They were able to run on the Akamai platform without thinking about building out new infrastructure, etc.

So many of our customers come to us and see significant cost savings and bottom line savings. But increasingly our customers are also seeing increased top-line revenue as well through better performance, reliability and scalability.

Gardner: I suppose in this changing landscape people are also interested in risk reduction. I might be in a pay-per-view model today, and I might want to move to a subscription model tomorrow. I probably want to continue advertising. And then there is this whole notion of syndication. How can I position myself to move among these different revenue models from the same sort of platform or infrastructure perspective?

Afergan: Exactly. I mean many of these customers want to have the flexibility and agility to expand really different business models, to be able to move and incorporate different types. Akamai takes that issue off the table in savings, which gives them the time and the money to invest elsewhere in their business.

With the tools and functionality in our platform, we allow them to shift between the models that you’ve mentioned. Their user model within their applications is supported by Akamai and can support authentication if they want to have a pay-per-view content model -- or targeting, if they decide later they want to do advertising. And, frankly, we have some customers who want to do free trials, too, so moving back and forth between the different models.

So flexibility and agility is fundamental to survival and success in the current exciting, rapidly changing marketplace. What it comes down to for our customers is to have a platform they can build on, both for their application logic and for their content delivery -- one that is not the bare-metal of the Internet. And that is why customers are using Akamai.

Gardner: Very good, thank you for explaining so much. This is clearly a changing landscape, so we will revisit some of these issues, I'm sure.

We have been talking today with Mike Afergan, the Akamai chief technology officer. And Akamai is the sponsor of our podcast today.

We’ve been discussing the explosion of content and media on the Internet, and how network services and shifting business models are requiring a richer set of capabilities from providers like Akamai. Thank you very much for joining us, Mike.

Afergan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you have been listening to a BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening.

Listen to the podcast here. Podcast sponsor: Akamai Technologies.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect podcast on Internet media delivery platforms. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2006. All rights reserved.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition Vol. 5 Podcast on Microsoft and SOA

Edited transcript of weekly BriefingsDirect[TM] SOA Insights Edition, recorded Nov. 10, 2006.

Listen to the podcast here. If you'd like to learn more about BriefingsDirect B2B informational podcasts, or to become a sponsor of this or other B2B podcasts, contact Dana Gardner at 603-528-2435.

Dana Gardner: Hi, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, a weekly discussion and dissection of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)-related news and events, with a panel of independent IT industry analysts, journalists and guests. I’m your host and moderator, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

And this week, the week of Nov. 10, 2006, our panel consists of show regular Steve Garone. Steve’s an independent analyst, a former program vice president at IDC, and a founder of the Align IT Group. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Garone: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Gardner: Also joining us again this week is Joe McKendrick. He’s an independent research consultant and columnist at Database Trends, as well as a blogger for ZDNet and ebizQ. Welcome back, Joe.

Joe McKendrick: Hi, Dana, it’s a pleasure to be here again.

Gardner: And making her debut on SOA Insights Edition is Mary Jo Foley. She’s a blogger for ZDNet’s All About Microsoft, a former Ziff Davis Media editor as well as a former eWEEK star reporter. Welcome to the show, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: A return guest this week is Jeff Pendleton. He’s a former IT and marketing executive at HP and BEA. Welcome back, Jeff.

Jeff Pendleton: Thank you, great to be here.

Gardner: Our discussion this week will center on two topics, both, of course, SOA-related. The first is Microsoft, which just had its Developer Connection event in Las Vegas, and Mary Jo attended that. Recently, I’ve been seeing some different positioning from Microsoft around SOA. They seem to have avoided the term SOA for some time, although a number of things that they do are very much SOA-aligned.

Now, they’ve been coming out with more lingo, or marketing, around SOA -- if not in the actual technology approach, at least in terms of the business values and the rationale for embarking on SOA. I say that because of the recent article I read that quoted Charles Fitzgerald, who is, I assume, the SOA marketing maven at Microsoft. His title is .NET Platform Strategy Group General Manager.

So, he’s a pretty good indicator of where the momentum is, and the direction is, for Microsoft on these subjects. He was at an event, the Microsoft Architect Forum 2006 just last month in Seoul, South Korea. He said of SOA: “It’s not about a product or skill, but rather it’s about style -- how one comes up with the system and basic approaches -- replacing or rewriting, depending on a particular business situation.”

It really does sound like he’s coming at this from a composite, inter-related services, re-use perspective. He also says that getting time-to-value is key and starting a practical approach to SOA makes sense. So we’re seeing from Microsoft a lot of the same kind of terminology we’ve heard out of BEA, IBM, and number of the other SOA vendors.

I want go to you first, Mary Jo, and ask you about what sort of sense you got at the latest Developer Connection event. Is Microsoft talking the talk around SOA, as far as you can determine?

Foley: You’re right, Dana. They really aren’t using the term "SOA" at all. The whole time I was in Las Vegas this week at different sessions I never heard anybody from Microsoft even mention the term. But as you’re saying too they’re introducing the pieces, and they’re talking about the value of integration.

Their whole “better together” strategy also incorporates not just Windows and Office, but also the .NET framework and Visual Studio pieces too. So, yeah, they’re definitely talking the talk, without actually saying the word.

Gardner: Interesting. Now, let’s go to you, Joe. What do you think is going on here? Do you think that Microsoft is only going to go as far as Web services on interoperability? Do you think they see SOA as a threat? Or is it just “SOA the Microsoft way,” and they don’t care to use that terminology?

McKendrick: Microsoft’s secret to success -- actually I wish I knew a little more of it -- since the day Bill Gates set up his first shop down in New Mexico has been playing to a mass market. You never see Microsoft make a move unless a mass market already exists for their product or technology.

Microsoft, rightly or wrongly, continually gets accused of copying, stealing, or co-opting the ideas and technologies of others. But that’s because it’s not a pioneering vendor. They don’t take the lead in moving into a technology space. They wait until this critical mass, this mass market within the vital center, crops up. And this suggests that perhaps SOA has reached that stage.

SOA is no longer the sole domain of the large organizations, large corporations, large government organizations, but it’s something that’s moving down to the mid-market and the mass-market. Typically, you wouldn’t expect "Joe’s Machine Tool" factory down the street to be worrying about SOA at this point, but perhaps, we’re getting close to that point.

Gardner: What do you think, Steve? Is Microsoft so departmental-level-oriented that they’re not interested in SOA until it becomes a bigger deal in the enterprise?

Garone: It’s an interesting question, and just to tie into the last point, I think there’s a counter-argument to the notion that they wait until things reach critical-mass before they get on board. I think probably the best example of that was Web services. I think it’s fair to say that Microsoft was fairly early into that game.

Gardner: Yes, the WS.* stuff, right?

Garone: Right. And I think the reason for that ties in to our conversation today to some extent, which is that Microsoft really needs that sort of services-based interoperability-founded paradigm, if you will, to be able to play in the enterprise, because it’s a single platform company and it needs to get beyond that.

So it tries to raise the level of abstraction and say, “I can play with everybody and here’s how I’m going to do it in a standards-based way.” In the context of this conversation, Microsoft is grafting to some extent onto the SOA concept for that same reason. Interestingly, if you look at some of the talk around Microsoft’s approach, they started to use the term “real-world SOA,” and the rationale for that is that organizations should not take this enterprise-wide, global view of SOA right away, but should start incrementally, in terms of solving individual business problems.

That’s really the core message: “Focus on your business, not on technology.” The reason for that may be that, in fact, Microsoft really isn’t ready to do the IBM thing when it comes to SOA. So, they’re trying to talk people down. But I think in terms of your question – Is Microsoft really serious about SOA? -- I think they are. They’ve got a stack of software that, to some extent, looks very much like what other vendors have. And, I think they’re going to continue to drum home that message.

Gardner: Do you think there’s some risk if Microsoft positions themselves as interoperable through standards? In effect, “Do all your development deployment around our stack, and if there’s other integration to be done, we kind of leave you to your own devices.”

When it comes to that lower level -- messaging level -- integration, where SOA seems to say, “Hey, use whatever you’ve got, let’s exploit your legacy and be an abstraction above those stacks,” does Microsoft run the risk of missing out by not going to that abstraction above the stacks?

Garone: Part of my point was that I think that they’re attempting to go above that. The old issues of, “Are their products scalable enough to be able to deal with very large global implementations?” is still an issue.

But, in concept, they’re trying to go above that. Recently, I saw a press release that says they have incorporated adapters for System i and System Z from IBM into BizTalk 2006. So, they’re looking at doing as you said -- getting that legacy, if you want to call it that, integrated into their view of what SOA should be.

Gardner: Let’s go back to Mary Jo. Did you see or hear much about the Microsoft equivalent of an enterprise service bus (ESB), their Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), which used to be called Indigo? Did they discuss that in terms of what you use to tie together all your Microsoft stuff, including all your legacy Windows -- because there is quite a bit of heterogeneity just within the Windows environment over the years? Do they talk about using it a lot for wider integration?

Foley: Yes, they’ve talked a lot about it at the conference, because they were talking about the .NET Framework 3.0, of which Indigo is one main component. The way they were talking about it to the audience that attended this conference was more about how you can mix and match managed APIs and unmanaged APIs.

And they’re encouraging people who are thinking about developing all kinds of apps -- custom apps, shrink-wrap apps -- to look at WCF as just one element of the way you tie things together, when you’re building an app. So, that was more the context they were talking about it at this conference. They weren’t really talking about it as a bridge across different kinds of systems from multiple vendors. It was more, “If you’re developing in the Microsoft universe, this is how you should think about it.”

Gardner: It almost sounds as if they’re expecting you’re going to need another ESB in addition to theirs in order to get the full benefit of SOA, as we’re currently defining it. Jeff, you’ve been an observer of Microsoft for a number years, is Microsoft singing the same song or are they opening themselves up sufficiently to be considered an SOA vendor?

Pendleton: I think they’re definitely moving very aggressively toward SOA. They may not be marketing and promoting it yet, but I think that they’ve actually been thinking about SOA, without necessarily using that term, for quite some time.

So when you talk to folks up there, the "Metropolis Conversation" comes up quite often. I know that they’ve had a couple of SOA events for some of their premier customers. I don’t think that we should assume that they’re not part of the story, and that they don’t get it.

They’re partnering with folks that you do think of when you think of SOA. I can’t tell you what their strategy is because I’m not quiet clear on it. I’m not privy to it. But I think you’ll probably hear more and more from Microsoft around the SOA story in the coming weeks and months.

Gardner: And, of course, we’ve seen some new tone or style from Microsoft vis-à-vis partnering with folks like Zend with PHP; partnering with Novell for SUSE Linux interoperability and patent protection.

So perhaps the notion is: write in anything, use Common Language Runtime in .NET, and then deploy more broadly with choice -- recognizing that because of virtualization and because of grid/utility, that the instances of underpinnings for services is really not where the game is at any more. The game is how you associate, mash-up, and aggregate services to create valuable and agile business processes. They can’t miss this business. This is the new business, right?

Pendleton: I think there are two ways to look at SOA, and I think Microsoft is taking probably a broader view of the term.

You started to talk about mash-ups, for example. Well, right now that’s the claim to fame for Web 2.0. If you’re a CIO trying to make sense of all of this stuff -- whether it’s creating virtualization, and so on -- you can either use SOA as an organizing principle for all of that. Or you can look at it as somewhat distinct from all of these other interesting trends and ideas.

And I think what Microsoft and some of the other organizations are doing is sitting back a little bit, waiting to find out whether SOA is going to become its own pillar, or whether it’s actually going to become an encompassing umbrella. I think Microsoft’s view is that it’s really more of an umbrella, under which to organize a lot of these other terms that are quite honestly starting to confuse the IT community.

Gardner: Help me understand a little bit better these two distinctions, or directions for SOA: the organizing principle and the umbrella principle.

Pendleton: Well, I think that if I were a CIO right now I’d probably have a massive headache, because you have these camps forming around these different notions. Before it was Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Well, what’s that? Why are they different?

And then you had the whole grid, and then you had mobility, and center networks. What you have are all of these disparate, or what appear to be disparate, concepts. And if you’re sitting back there with a fairly limited exploration budget, what do you do?

Do you fall into the Web 2.0 camp? Is that really a camp? Right now, the market has so many buzzwords, or so many “platforms,” to consider that it’s again freezing the deer in the headlights.

With SOA you can either look at as a distinct camp, competing against other distinct camps, or you can look at it as a way -- as an umbrella under which all of these other things make sense. That comes back to Microsoft’s point, which is that SOA’s not really a technology. It’s more of a philosophy of how to approach IT going forward.

Gardner: According to Charles Fitzgerald at Microsoft, SOA is not about a skill; rather it’s about a style.

McKendrick: If I can interject here, it’s interesting, a fellow named Jack Greenfield, an enterprise architect over at Microsoft, a couple of years back published a paper, “Defining a Strategy,” which he called “Software Factories.”

And essentially what he said was that going forward software development at all levels will probably resemble the way industrialization changed the economy earlier in the century. He calls it “mass customization,” where you are actually going to have perhaps pre-built modular construction, kind of a move away from single-item customization and toward a mass production kind of model.

His paper kind of defines the direction Microsoft is looking at over the long term. It’s particularly a design-time development side, and Microsoft is strong in the developer community. That’s their natural constituency.

Gardner: Isn’t that another way of saying that software development is going from the equivalent of an “artisan, craftsman, renaissance-era, funded by the Medicis, money is no object” thing to more of a “Henry Ford assembly line, interchangeable parts” -- an Eli Whitney and the cotton gin -- kind of mentality, where it’s industrialized, with not so much of the handcrafting. If the handcrafting is going to happen, it’s going to be in the handcrafting of the first parts, but then those parts will be assembled on a standardized, highly repeatable process.

Garone: Exactly. That’s well-put, and Microsoft’s goal since day-one has always been to make computing easier for folks who don’t have a lot of technical background. You can pick up Visual Basic fairly quickly, even though you may not have a technical background. They see this as the vision going forward for enterprise applications, not that non-technical people will be put into enterprise applications development, but you won’t need to re-invent the wheel and have a degree in rocket science to master this.

Gardner: Steve, you and I have talked a lot about the complexity as a possible speed brake on SOA adoption, and in the understanding of it. Do you think that Microsoft, given it’s history of working diligently to simplify the development-deployment process -- albeit around a proprietary environment -- is what’s necessary to make SOA sell?

Garone: It is true that Microsoft really has a lot of strength in the developer community, and has been lauded for a number of years now on the quality and ease of use of its tools and its approach to software development.

There’s really is no doubt about that. And I think that the point that was just talked about, while not really a new idea, is all about reuse and ease of development and development efficiency and so on. That is definitely a strong component in making SOA successful, but it really isn’t SOA.

Creating modularized software is one thing. Bringing that to the next level of creating services, and creating the interoperability among services, that’s required to do SOA -- with all the infrastructure, governance, and security, and so on -- is a whole other level.

And again, I think Microsoft does appear to be telling that story more and more. They are telling it in their own context, which again has two components. One of which is: Start incrementally and solve this specific business problem. I think we’ll hear more from them, and I think it will become more and more part of what their message is going out to world.

Gardner: Mary Jo, I know you need to drop off, and I certainly appreciate you joining us, but one more questions for you. Did you get a sense from the latest that you’ve heard from Microsoft that they are focusing on the crafting of these services individually -- services that will play together well -- but that Microsoft is not necessarily yet focused on how to associate, choreograph, and manage services, regardless of where they came from?

Foley: Now, what do you mean when you’re saying “services?”

Gardner: Well, “services” would be an application or business function, let’s say an order or billing function, that would be something you could drop into any business process, where that same function would be required. And that service might be running on your own servers. It might be running on some department server ... or it could be outsourced, or even from a partner that you have in your supply chain.

Foley: It’s interesting that Microsoft had another conference in Europe – their Convergence EMEA Conference -- where [Microsoft Chairman] Bill Gates was keynoting. There, they were talking about business processes as services, and their vision there is really changing quite a bit, given the company’s move to making everything into a "Live" service by making it either ad-supported or subscription-based.

So they’re actually trying to talk about some of their products that have traditionally not been available as services now in the context of them being services -- things like their dynamic ERP products and dynamic CRM products. They are also encouraging third-party software vendors to think that way, too, and to introduce business processes as services. That would snap into the Microsoft Live Office context and framework.

Gardner: Now, another thing that Gates said in his address at that conference was that he thinks Microsoft is in the best position to tie together back-office and front-office applications. That kind of gives us a hint as to maybe what they’re thinking about SOA.

And, of course, they had to shift gears as a company pretty dramatically only in the last year-and-half by elevating [Microsoft Chief Architect] Ray Ozzie to his position and creating this whole Live Office approach. And so the notion is that perhaps they have to compete with both SOA, in terms of a BEA and IBM definition of SOA -- but they also have to compete with Google and the Web 2.0-type of functions that are a direct threat to their desktop revenue stream.

So it’s a difficult maneuver for them to do a trajectory toward SOA, but also covering their behinds when it comes to Web 2.0.

Foley: I was actually going to ask you guys -- because I am really curious whether the whole notions and concepts around SOA can fit in with the kind of "Live" vision that Microsoft is talking about. Or are they opposites in a way?

Gardner: I think they’re actually complementary. We’ve heard a lot of of rich Internet applications as UIs and GUIs, but that represents services on the back-end in most places. What’s your take on that, Joe?

McKendrick: Agreed. Also, despite all the talk of Linux and the move to rich Internet applications, Microsoft still owns the desktop. Surveys I’ve done, surveys I’ve seen, confirm just that.

The desktop and the Office worker, the information knowledge worker, still rely on Windows at the front end. This is at least a third of Microsoft’s revenue, and it really shows no sign of abating. Novell has been aggressively promoting the notion of a Linux desktop, but it’s still got a long way to go. The notion of connecting the front end with the back end is natural for Microsoft, because that’s their home turf -- the front-end desktop.

Gardner: Indeed. Before they had this change on the Windows Vista time-table, where [Microsoft Platforms and Services Division Co-President Jim] Allchin and others had to come in and say, “Well, we have to postpone this,” they were really talking up this notion of using Office applications as the front-ends for back-end services, rather than have the Web continue on its trajectory. the had decided to double-down on Office applications as the new best front ends.

Of course that was also in evidence when they had the Mendocino project in cooperation with SAP, around using Office applications as a front-end to SAP processes in the back-end.

Now, let’s go back to you, Jeff. Is that what we are seeing here -- that Microsoft is in a very difficult ju-jitsu position of trying to embrace and extend toward SOA -- but at the same time needing to have a defensive posture vis-à-vis these Live services, such as what Google does, and to be able to monetize those around advertising, while also trying to craft a new future for the Office applications?

Pendleton: Good question. I don’t know that I have keen insight into what’s keeping Microsoft awake at night. I do think that they are very well positioned, given where we’re going right now with SOA and other things.

I can’t venture a guess on what's going on at Microsoft in that regard, other than to say they really are partnering very aggressively with folks that have in the past been their competitors. And maybe they’ve always done that.

But around the notion of SOA I get a distinct impression that they understand that their vision of SOA isn’t that much different than what others have. Yet they come from a unique position in terms of how to connect and collect these services and begin over time to play a syndication role.

So they’re actually in a very good position, but there are so many things going on right now that it’s hard to predict what's ultimately going to take root and really drive SOA forward.

Gardner: All right, back to you, Steve. It also seems that Microsoft is in between these trends: SOA, let’s call it a major trend, and then Web 2.0 with perhaps an assault on the Office franchise.

There’s also a shift in business models. That is to say, more people are expecting the business to shift from an up-front licensing, client-access-license-model to more of an advertising-based or subscription-based model, or both.

Microsoft obviously needs to make this transition, as do as other vendors. What makes this more complicated -- even though Microsoft is in a good position given its penetration in the market – is that it also has to manage it’s own internal politics. There are different elements within Microsoft, and they’re in charge of these different product sets in these different domains.

So they have to also manage this transition in the business model internally. My question to you, Steve, is: Yes, Microsoft is well-positioned, but don’t they also have a quite a bit to chew here? And isn’t this really a very thorny issue for them?

Garone: I’m not sure that the issue is as thorny as it is unique to Microsoft. Being the size they are and having the variety of products and services that they provide -- the political and organizational thorniness goes up exponentially with that level of diversity.

So I think it’s definitely a big problem, and I’m not sure I’m in a position to give a lot of insight on internal Microsoft politics. But it’s serious enough that if it’s not handled well, it could have a major impact on the company’s future.

I've seen it happen in other places. I was an employee for number of years with Digital Equipment Corp., and saw new business models literally bring the company down in a lot of areas because of this kind of internal friction. So, it does happen.

On the brighter side for Microsoft, I think that you know I would like to think that Microsoft has a more of a new-age view of the world in that it understands it has to be agile, and it was built on the notion that new business models are what's going to drive their growth.

Hopefully they’ll take that religion to heart. But I don’t have a lot of visibility, unfortunately, into what's going on internally at Microsoft. I can’t say with any certainty that they’re going to be able to deal with that well. But, again, a lot of their competitors are going to have the same problem.

Gardner: I guess Microsoft, given its position and its balance sheet, has the ability to tolerate a very large margin of error if they need to. Right?

Garone: Right! But also the discussion a little bit earlier centered on their ownership of the desktop. Ultimately, if you put the word desktop in quotes, then that is really what’s going to drive them. I put it in quotes because, in fact, the desktop may look a lot different in 10 years than it does today.

Gardner: Isn’t the whole notion of the desktop being itself virtualized?

Garone: Absolutely. So when you dream into the future -- not necessarily with what exists today, but what it might be -- and you think about the notion of virtualizing computing resources and making everything you can a service, and having all that interoperability, the notion of a desktop may change to something that isn’t even on your desktop when you turn on your machine. But when you access a service, that will define what's on your desktop -- even including the runtime and operating environment.

Gardner: I would argue that the concept of desktop is outmoded and obsolete, and we really should focus on the processes, applications, and productivity. Perhaps you’ll keep your address book, but your files will probably just be another point in some cloud or element within the general cloud that you don’t need to be concerned about. What you really are going to focus on is productivity and process.

Garone: Nobody has a crystal ball at this point around this forum they we’re having right now. I think it’s important to remember that context when you think about where Microsoft is going to go and how it’s going to adapt.

Gardner: Let’s move on to our second topic of the day, and that is to pick up where we left off last week in trying to figure out the best way of conceptualizing SOA’s business value, and to then be able to take it out to the market.

In our past discussion, we said, “Hey, let's bring [Apple Chairman] Steve Jobs in on this," because he is really good at bringing technology into a passionate -- almost zealous -- direction for people, and they follow him in that regard. But then we also figured that if Steve Jobs were trying to market SOA, he wouldn’t even mention SOA.

Then, we got into this notion that SOA really should be something that is like a sound stage, or an architectural blueprint -- a way of being able to construct and then deconstruct and to be agile with business, rather than technology. Has anyone given additional thought to that, and where should we take this discussion next in terms of emphasizing the rationale of why people should go to SOA now rather than just sit back and wait and watch?

Garone: I’ve been doing a lot of talking with both vendors and end-users recently and I think where the discussion needs to go is around is that the vendors seem to be caught up in a contradiction in terms. When they go out and talk to their prospects and customers about SOA, they try their best to create a message around business value, business agility and bringing real value to a line-of-business manager.

But then they immediately switch to tell you how valuable and how of high-quality their ESB is, and why you should use it. I think that’s a real issue today, because it really confuses customers.

On the one hand, they are being evangelized to about why they should be going in this direction, and on the other hand they are being pushed into a specific implementation that may not be right for them. So, the vendors face the real challenge in terms of being able to evangelize why people should do SOA and educating people about SOA in terms of how it impacts the business, and on the other hand to be able to go ahead and sell their products and bring their own revenue levels to where they want them to be.

Resolving that issue in a way that will help both vendors and end-users understand better, and be able to be more successful, is really the conversation that needs to be had.

Gardner: Jeff, what's your reaction to that?

Pendleton: That’s right on the mark. SOA is a great conversation to have, but at the end of the day, with the marketing community and the sales community, they need to sell something. Right now, given how amorphous SOA is and how it can be just about anything, it is complicated from a vendor perspective to walk away with an order.

What really needs to happen is that there needs to be a compelling story around the 21st Century enterprise, what that really means, and what some of the attributes are. We need to talk about SOA as an enabler and a cornerstone for that 21st Century, but there are other cornerstones. And we are not really talking about that so much.

How do you need to view your people? Are these folks that are tied to a desk almost automatons doing a routine process, or are they really plugged into the external environment? How are you organized?

Gardner: I would think optimally that your people would not be doing rote process, but they would be defining what the new next process is.

Pendleton: Exactly. But I think that for SOA to really capture the imagination of the business community -- which ultimately is going to have to fund this thing through some sort of a capital expense increase -- we are going to need to create something more compelling and inspiring, than just the “agile” or “adaptive,” or "whatever" enterprise.

That’s why we came back to the Steve Jobs notion. We need folks out there, we need inspiration right now in the business community, to say, “Here is what you should be shooting for, and if you don’t shoot for this you may not be relevant here in the next little while. And one of the enablers of this is this thing called SOA. So, let's go talk to your IT guys about this SOA thing.”

Gardner: Yes, I guess on a higher level we’re really talking about IT transformation, and not on its own -- but IT transformation as an essential ingredient to business transformation.

Pendleton: We lead with business transformation and how you do that transformation. One of the things is how you manage your people going forward, and the other is how do you manage your IT going forward.

Gardner: You mentioned "agile" and "adaptive." Just recently I’ve noticed that HP is now doing some different advertising, at least to the financial community. In the Wall Street Journal you have these pictures of people upside down. They are the IT people and they are saying turn your IT upside down, which to me sounds like IT transformation.

But instead of adaptive enterprise, they are now taking the marketing positioning that their Mercury acquisition had around BTO, Business Technology Optimization, which is a broad, but pretty direct, definition of what we are really trying to accomplish.

Pendleton: Right now IT is still this monolithic, fragile, complex -- take all the negative, skeptical terms – entity. Most line-of-business executives really don’t like to go into the IT space. I don't think that IT is being positioned around the strategy table as something that's really going to help move the organization.

A lot of the fault lies within the IT community itself. Over the years, we’ve tried to dazzle and use rocket science as a way to define IT. The reality is that IT needs to be part of the day-to-day thinking -- not the day-to-day excuse -- of business.

Gardner: IT has perhaps over-promised and under-delivered over-budget, which has tended to pigeon-hole it into being a cost-center and an inhibitor of agility. That's what really needs to be adjusted. Do you agree with that, Joe?

Mckendrick: I agree with that, but I think we have come a long way. If you look at the world as it was even 10 years ago there was this chasm between IT and the rest of the business. Nowadays, folks on the business side are much more savvy about computers. Everybody has a laptop and a home computer, and the world has really changed in that regard. You have a generation of employees coming on the scene in their 20s and 30s, who grew up with computers. They know to a large degree how computers work, the logic of computers, and what computers can do for a business.

Gardner: You can pull their PC out of their cold, dead hands -- right?

McKendrick: Exactly. So, on the business side there is a greater understanding of computer technology and what and how technology can deliver services. It’s a much greater understanding than it’s ever been in corporate history. On the other side, you are seeing and hearing about this tremendous push to get IT folks to understand the business and work closer with the business.

I have spoken with folks at university programs, training both technical and business people, and the courses that get the greatest attendance are those that talk about the convergence of business and IT -- IT folks taking business classes, for example, to understand the business.

Gardner: Another event this week was the Web 2.0 Summit, the O’Reilly show in San Francisco, where Intel came out with a Web 2.0 suite -- I think they are calling it SuiteTwo -- which is a series of independent, largely open-source-backed and -based features and functions, if you will, of Web 2.0.

They are directing it at the enterprise, to say, "Do your blogging, your wiki’s, and your podcasts. Do collaboration, communication, and social networking -- not just leaving it out in the ether for people to do for their personal life issues and their entertainment media issues. But bring it into the environment of the enterprise. We can use these tools for building consensus around a process or doing exception management through a wiki-based approach."

That’s an interesting ingredient here that I don’t think we can divorce from SOA. It is part of taking advantage of these younger folks who would like to do things this way, but then bring that into the enterprise in some controlled fashion, so that the older IT people will not be threatened, but actually embrace it.

Steve, what do you think about Web 2.0 vis-a-vis SOA?

Garone: There is a lot of discussion about it, and I think to some extent it's happening. But when I go out and talk to those communities, what I see is that the business folks most of the time really just draw a picture, bring it over to the IT managers, and say, "Do this for me."

They are not quite there yet, and they don’t believe that the IT folks are really where they need to be in terms of not just talking with them about business, but actually thinking business when they do their work. I am not really sure what that means, but I keep getting that feedback that they are not thinking in the right way in the eyes of business mangers.

The bottom line is that there is a ways to go, and we are not quite there yet. It’s important to recognize, in terms of just how quickly and with how much energy, this new world that SOA is a part of will move forward and be adopted. What you just described in terms of Web 2.0 sounds fascinating to me. I wasn’t privy to the information that you’ve just told us about in terms of Intel, but doesn’t that sound exciting when you think about it?

Gardner: Perhaps, if we are talking about the inhibitor here being people in the way they think, in the way they conceptualize their job -- what it is that they are expected to do -- then perhaps it’s going to be fear of competition that ultimately drives this. If your competitors think differently, embrace some of these new concepts -- SOA, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 -- become fleet and agile at a lower cost over time, then you really don’t have a choice, right?

Garone: Another element to talk about is the fact that I have been hearing a lot of people talk about SOA and presenting case studies on SOA recently. One the things that really comes through to me is that, despite vendor’s efforts to evangelize around the benefits of SOA in terms of business agility, and be more competitive and so on, virtually all the case studies I see focus on the benefit of saving money, saving resources, and being able to run lean operationally, and being able to develop applications more efficiently. It's really all about cost to these people at this point.

Gardner: Another accelerant in the movement toward SOA, whether you call it SOA or not, whether you are Microsoft or not, is the emergence of software-as-a-service companies that themselves are starting from a green-field position using SOA to create business applications.

So, another development this week that has a big bearing on this is Dave Duffield, the man behind PeopleSoft, coming out with something called WorkDay. They took a look at the business applications environment and then built his offerings on an ESB -- it happens to be a Cape Clear ESB -- to create services swiftly and agilely, and at probably significantly lower cost.

This could have been done in the past -- because he has done it in the past -- but the new offer is a set of business applications as services. They might be very attractive, if not to the large enterprises, then to the small or medium business. If WorkDay can make their business work through SOA, doesn’t that in a sense spur on others?

Pendleton: Exactly. There is another company, Reardon Commerce, which also has built its infrastructure on reusable components, SOA-enabled components, and Web services. The company started offering a travel service and so forth to corporate clients through this framework, and they have expanded -- again reusing the components they have in place -- to also offer additional business services such as inventory tracking.

Gardner: Jeff, let's give you the last word before we start wrapping up. And that would be: Do you see software and service organizations like WorkDay and Reardon as a primary accelerant to the adoption of SOA? Or do you think that a competitive issue -- that if your competitor does SOA better than you do, then you are going to be at a significant disadvantage -- is the driver? Or is it both?

Pendleton: There's quite a bit of debate in the industry right now about software services -- being able to buy components of your process and being able to plug it in. Software services is a natural fit within our definition of SOA, and I think it's going to become more and more apparent over time.

So, I would say both. I do believe, though, that we’ve still not come up with the compelling picture, tag line, whatever you want, for SOA for business people like we have had in the previous waves. We don’t yet have an "e-commerce" equivalent right now.

Gardner: Wasn’t IBM kind of the force behind e-commerce as the definition, and then taking and spending a significant amount of money in marketing that?

Pendleton: Yes, E-Business.

Gardner: I guess we will be looking for that.

So, to sum up a little bit, some interesting things out of Microsoft. We’re going to expect them to get into SOA more. Perhaps they are taking a little bit of a wait-and-see approach. They’ve got a full plate, given the multi-faceted challenge before them.

And we’re also looking at SOA perhaps creeping in as a competitive issue as well, spurred on by software as a service in terms of cost, with small- to medium-sized businesses perhaps adapting first, rather than the larger enterprises.

With us to discuss this have been a distinguished and interesting panel, and I thank you all: Steve Garone, Joe McKendrick, Mary Jo Foley, and Jeff Pendleton.

I wonder if we could all do our due diligence for disclosure exercise now. I’ll start. The companies that were mentioned that I do business with and are sponsors of my podcasts include Cape Clear and Hewlett-Packard. I think that’s it. Why don’t you go next, Steve.

Garone: Based on the companies that were mentioned here really right now, it's just IBM.

McKendrick: Likewise, it's IBM.

Gardner: And, Jeff, you don’t have any corporate affiliation at this time, so you’re clean. Mary Jo, I believe, is a blogger alone and doesn't have sponsorships or consulting arrangements with vendors.

Great, so I’d also like to alert our listeners if they’re interested in learning more about BriefingsDirect, B2B informational podcasts or to become a sponsor of this or other B2B podcasts to please contact me directly, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions at 603-528-2435.

Thanks for joining us and come back next week for another edition of BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition. Thanks everyone.

Listen to the podcast here.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Vol. 5. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2006. All rights reserved.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect Podcast on Open Source SOA and Celtix Enterprise

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM] podcast with Dana Gardner, recorded Nov. 17, 2006.

Podcast sponsor: IONA Technologies.

Listen to the podcast here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about the intersection of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and open source software.

This is a very big deal these days. We’ve got a lot of action going on within a variety of open source projects and foundations, and a variety of different aspects of SOA being developed and designed with commercial and open source input. To help us weed through this are two executives from IONA Technologies. I’d like to welcome Oisin Hurley, a distinguished engineer with IONA. He’s also an Eclipse SOA Tools Platform Project lead and a contributor to the Services Component Architecture (SCA) initiative. Welcome to the show, Oisin.

Oisin Hurley: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Also joining us is Debbie Moynihan. She is director of open source programs for IONA Technologies. Welcome, Debbie.

Debbie Moynihan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: As we mentioned, there seems to be a confusing set of directions for SOA these days. If I’m a CIO in a corporation and I’m thinking about bringing SOA principles and methodologies into play, I also need technologies. I need to have tools, I need to have runtimes, I need to have governance. I’m wondering, “Wow, should I go with one or two large vendors? Should I lock into one specific approach? Or should I take advantage of a best-of-breed approach, where I might use components and approaches from a variety of vendors?”

I’m also going to be scratching my head, now that I am learning more about these open-source alternatives. So, first I’d like to go to Oisin. Can you help us weed out a little bit of why all these different alternatives are cropping up now, and how do you see open source and SOA coming together over the next two or three years?

Hurley: Well, Dana SOA is a very important architectural movement in our industry at the moment, and it requires couple of things to become even more successful. It requires innovation, and it requires infrastructure on which it can live. If you look at open source it’s possibly the greatest source in innovation that’s happening right now.

In community-developed open source people are putting together answers to a lot of the problems that people are seeing within SOA. Of course, community-developed open source is there already. It’s not just a new thing. And when you look to the infrastructure side of it, you’ll see that Apache Software Foundation [products] have been out there and deployed for many years.

Gardner: Something does seem to be different with SOA is that in the past we’ve seen open source crop up around technologies that had already been fairly mature in the commercial sense. For example, there was the web server, with the Netscape offering years ago. And then there was the Microsoft IIS offering, and then we had Apache [HTTP Web Server] come in as a sort of runner up -- but then dominate the marketplace.

We saw a similar effect with Linux; we had UNIX and Windows as platforms for some years -- and with a great degree of maturity -- before Linux caught on and moved forward. But it’s different now with SOA; we’re seeing open-source benefits principles and business models applied to SOA from the very beginning, even before there’s maturation. Why do you think that’s different and what does that portend for SOA?

Hurley: The thing that’s driving a lot of the community-developed open source within SOA are requirements from CIOs and from commercial vendors, as well as the requirements that have come from the more traditional kind of community approaches. And again, it’s all of those getting together -- rapid innovation to solve the issues -- and thus SOA is presenting to organizations the vision of a distributed SOA infrastructure, for example.

Gardner: What is it about open source that is different now? Has this become the de facto best way to produce innovation?

Hurley: There are three things that we usually see our customers looking for. They want to generate greater ROI. They want to be able to streamline and modernize their IT environments. And they basically want to lower the total cost of their IT operations. Community-developed open source is all about good code, and its all about innovation at that lower cost point.

Gardner: Let’s move over to Debbie. Your role with IONA is driving the strategic product management and product marketing activities around IONA’s open source lines of business. Why has IONA moved to open source? Tell us a little bit about the evolution of your enterprise service bus (ESB) product. How is that going from Artix to its newer iteration? And tell us a little bit about the open source direction as well.

Moynihan: Sure, but before I go into our open-source philosophy, I want to talk a little bit about our SOA philosophy. They really go hand in hand. SOA, even though it’s a very popular term, really has been around for quite some time, particularly in financial services and manufacturing.

If you look back at some of the early deployments in services-oriented architecture, you’ll see that many of them are built on CORBA. As you know about IONA’s history, we’re very interested and have been very involved in a lot of those early implementations with CORBA. Some of the same things that people were looking to do early on still are true today: Looking to do loosely coupled implementations, highly distributed, and with a high focus on industry standards.

But what we’ve seen over time, as you look at the technologies for SOA, there are really the three phases with any technology: innovation, standardization, and commoditization. Open source is really the way that we’ve seen software development evolving toward that commoditization piece.

One thing that we’ve seen, and particularly with SOA, is that the window has been compressed between those three phases. The commoditization is happening faster and faster. And so we made a proactive decision about 18 months ago to open source some of our SOA technology. We initially involved our CORBA product portfolio. We introduced our Artix portfolio, and then quickly made the decision to open source part of that technology -- and we initiated the Celtix open-source ESB project.

The new iteration of that is actually broader and expanded to incorporate multiple open-source projects. The goal is to help solve some of the barriers that people are seeing today in incorporating open source into SOA -- bringing together multiple projects and integrating them, and also having the same enterprise support that they would like for all the software that they’re using in their infrastructure.

A key part of our strategy is to continue to focus on standards, continue to allow people to get the best of ways to integrate in a distributed way, but also to use open source when they can. As we were talking about earlier, we believe there is a lot of innovation and faster innovation -- and it’s very high quality -- when you use open source software.

Gardner: Oisin, maybe you can help me with this. When I look at open source and SOA coming together, I wonder whether the open-source benefits are primarily for the vendors of SOA components, or are they predominantly for enterprises and perhaps large organizations like telecommunications carriers to make a SOA stack on their own using these components.

Do you think that the types of activities that IONA is involved with -- CXF and some others, and working with Apache -- are these efforts going to be something that is going to be used primarily by other vendors or by the enterprises, and to what degree? How is this going to manifest itself in the market?

Hurley: What our customers require from us, and what we kind of aspire to, is a distributor approach to SOA. It’s the right approach, rather than taking on a stack or developing something like a hub-and-spoke architecture. Really it’s all about what the right shift for the problem at hand and for the people that are solving the problem. So, whether it’s an organization that’s doing its own internal IT, or an organization that works and does IT for yet other organizations -- it’s all about trying to solve the problem. It’s about being able to go in and address this on a piecemeal basis to make a start, to be able to incrementally adopt more elements, and to have an adaptable skill.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about some specific projects, so people can follow these. What are the ones that you think are most important right now that will make an impact in how SOA evolves, and how people actually use it in the field?

Hurley: Okay, well, there are a number of open-source projects that IONA is involved in that play right into this area. We have the CXF project at Apache, which is a community-developed, from-scratch, open-source ESB runtime.

There is the SOA Tools Project at Eclipse Foundation, which is there to bring together and address all of the issues that SOA developers will discover on their way to producing SOA for their employers and others. And, there are some other projects like Tuscany, which is a community-developed open-source implementation of SCA specification, again at Apache.

There are other major ones as well that address all the elements of a distributed SOA infrastructure, such as Qpid and Yoko, which are both Apache projects, and other projects that you may know of already that are being sold as products such as Mule and ServiceMix.

Gardner: As organizations examine these projects and try to evaluate them in terms of risk -- that is, they say, “Is this something I want to put into production? Is this something I want to test with?” What do you think needs to happen in terms of a maturation or acceptance before an enterprise or global Fortune 2000 organization will come up and say, “Yeah, I’m going to go in this [open source] direction, I’m going to make a bet on this?”

How will we know when these projects are ready for prime time?

Hurley: These projects are getting a lot of take-up right now. So, we have different types of customers that are adopting these projects at different rates. Because of the way that community-developed open-source software is made available, it’s very, very straightforward for an organization to go in and say, “We’re going to work with this. We’re going to try a project. We’re going to see how that project works out, and then if that is successful then we can move on.”

One of the advantages of developing software in an open community is that those organizations have the freedom to add their particular innovative requirements and actually commit code to those actual projects to help bring it along toward the goal that they want.

Gardner: Debbie, how about you? What about the future? Where are we going to go with these open-source projects? Tell us a little bit about how IONA views this from a business model? How is it that the open-source SOA approach and the commercial approach hand off from one to another or relate or make you guys a leader?

Moynihan: I think what customers are looking for in a SOA, as we’ve been talking about, is a distributed approach. They’re looking to reduce their cost, first in any new investments that they make, and then their over-all fixed and operating costs as they move forward.

And so, it gives them that ability to get even more reuse out of their existing implementations. If you look at IONA’s strategy, we are very focused on offering an architecture that allows people to be able to adopt SOA in an incremental way. We’re also offering the ability to leverage the true benefits of open source to be able to use community-developed software whenever possible. And to offer not just a single project, but to integrate the projects together in a cohesive offering.

People can really tie together the older standards that they have in place with these newer SOA standards like SCA. They can tie in the widely deployed open-source projects they might already be using -- like Tomcat, for example. And they also get new [open source] innovation and then wrap it around that.

One thing that has been missing, but you’re starting to see it evolve, is enterprise support backing it all up ... the expertise. When people come and talk with us or we go and talk with them, and we talk about IONA’s open source strategy – they really like that we’re a middleware company and not an open-source company.

Well, we didn’t start as an open source company; we started as a middleware company. We started as an integration company, and now we can really offer this combination of, “You can use open source. You can get started. It’s a great way to dip your toe in the water and start enabling services across your enterprise." But then, as you grow and you scale your SOA infrastructure, you may need to scale up. You may need some new requirements that are not available on open source today.

From that perspective, we have these complimentary offerings, like the Artix product family, which can interoperate directly with the open source offerings that we support. So really we provide everything that you need for a distributed SOA infrastructure, and we allow you to use open source only, or a combination when you need some of these other requirements. And, most importantly, to leverage what you already have in place today.

Gardner: And this is one of the goals of open source -- to have standardization. And that standardization would influence not only how enterprises use you, but also other vendors. So it’s the development of an ecology for the community. Tell us a little bit about how IONA fits into an ecology of SOA providers?

Moynihan: I would say in two ways. One is that we are absolutely focused on standards. All the offerings that we participate in, and the things that we develop within our company -- whether it’s community-developed or company-developed -- we’re very focused on standards. This is one way where we integrate and interoperate with an ecosystem.

The other is through the collaborative nature of partnering, both with open-source projects, like with BEA and IBM, for example on the Tuscany/SCA project, and also from a commercial-product perspective. For our company-developed offerings we have partnerships in place, for example, with AmberPoint, where we actually do proactive integrations with specific technology components to create an ecosystem.

Gardner: I guess systems integrators also play a big role in this. They will, in many respects, be picking and choosing -- anointing, if you will -- the SOA winners or leaders. It’s in their best interests to have the best technology available. What do you think systems integrators are thinking when it comes to open-source SOA, and do they fall into your ecology as well?

Moynihan: I definitely think that they are a key part of the ecosystem. A lot of users will want to work with system integrators as they adopt these technologies. They are looking for a lot of the same things that the end customers would be looking for. They would be looking to adopt open-source projects and open-source products that are able to integrate with existing standards and new standards. These are innovative SOA approaches like SCA. They are looking for a lot of the same things, and can also bring a lot of value because with open source there is a lot of integration. System integrators are going to be a key part of the overall ecosystem.

Gardner: When I speak to end users in large organizations, one of the things that seems to be attractive for them when it comes to SOA is a notion of risk reduction. They view this as a way of reducing their risk of not being able to extend and recover their past investments in legacy systems, for example.

They view this as a reduction in risk in terms of flexibility, agility, and moving quickly to create applications: Composite applications and process-oriented and event-driven applications and services. They also view this as risk reduction when it comes to being able to move quickly into new technologies.

So, they’re “future proofing” -- if you will -- being able to manage what comes down in the future, things that they might not be able to fully anticipate. So, given this nature of risk reduction that’s inherent with SOA, what do you bring to the table in terms of lock-in risk reduction?

That’s something that people have feared for some time, getting locked into one or even a small number of vendors. It seems to me that the open-source SOA approach reduces risk from both the overall SOA perspective as well as the issue of lock-in. Oisin, how do you see that?

Hurley: Well, you’re pretty much spot-on in your statements there, Dana. If an organization wants to reduce risk and increase their level of control on an ongoing basis, community-developed open source is exactly what they need. Because there is a great focus on standards and the code is available. That gives them more control because there is a wide community -- both among the actual open-source developers themselves and organizations that provide products dedicated to supporting the software that’s been developed by the those communities. So this is regaining control for the customer.

Gardner: Now, we also hear that SOA is not just technology. It's not just code. It’s really a mentality. It’s a conceptual framework, a methodology set. How do we cross this benefit matrix between what we can bring to the table from an open-source perspective and also get what needs to be a fairly disciplined approach, when it comes to these methodologies and conceptual frameworks?

One would almost think that they are at odds, that open source can be a little bit chaotic, and yet methodologies need to be disciplined and have a bit more of a control-and-command approach. How do you go to your customers and explain to them how you can have an open-source approach to something that needs to be so methodologically precise?

Hurley: Well, for somebody like me, who’s involved in open source communities, the one thing they are not is chaotic. They tend to be the most strictly controlled and strictly behaved groups of people.

They’re very, very thorough -- extremely thorough, because the people who are in there love the subject matter. They love the code. They are always concerned about it.

If you go and if you look at an Eclipse project or you look at an Apache project, you would see very cohesive behavior. The discipline is there within those communities -- and I will say it’s a meritocracy. They self-police.

To get back to your question, though, the important thing to bring across to the customer is that the job of actually putting together SOA is, as you say, technology independent. It’s on a higher level. It’s about how you offer functionality to the business. So, if you are in IT operations, how do you put together functionality that the business will use for its own customers? You bring to them good technology [and] guidance on how to produce services.

Gardner: Looking now at the road map, you have had some announcements recently. Can you lay out for us how your two or three trajectories for this go. Commercially, via open source, and also via "commercial open source." Give us a roadmap for IONA’s approach to SOA infrastructure.

Moynihan: What we recently launched was really expanding our existing approach to distributed SOA infrastructure, where we did have products in the market already, which were company-developed products. What we recently announced were community-developed products under the umbrella offering Celtix Enterprise, which really is an open-source offering that ties together multiple open source projects in a cohesive way.

Users can take that and use it to get started today on implementing a distributed SOA infrastructure. If they choose, they can have the benefit of support from IONA. You called it “commercial open source.” I would say it’s vendor-supported open source, because it is an open-source license, and you can go to our site and you can download the code and use it today. If and when you choose to get support, then you would come back to IONA, and we would work with you to determine what the right level of support would be for you.

So, I would really say that it is an open-source offering backed both by our expertise in bringing the community-developed projects together, and then the integration, as well as providing an "easier to consume" offering. We also offer more documentation, tutorials, demos, and things like that, to make it easier to get going with open-source SOA. For those who are looking for enterprise support, we also offer that. But I would say that’s an additional offering that we came up with.

So, we have this open source offering, and it's actually a family of offerings where we have Celtix Enterprise as an open-source ESB. We have Celtix Advanced Messaging, an open-source message broker, which is an implementation of the new Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP), the new open standard for sending messages.

Then, we also have Celtix Advanced Service Engine, which is based on the Apache incubator CXF project, which is for creating services and service-enabling your overall infrastructure. Complementary to that, for those who want it, we also offer enterprise consulting and training support.

The road map going forward would be that we will continue to evolve a collection of offerings, both company-developed like our Artix portfolio, which today meets a lot of requirements around distributed SOA Infrastructure – as well as a lot of requirements that are not available in open source today -- as complementary to our open-source portfolio.

We want to offer our customers the benefits of open source, but also offer them additional capabilities so they can scale and get beyond what’s available in open source. We can provide all the additional capabilities they need with our full product portfolio. I think what IONA brings to that roadmap is all of our expertise in being able to continue to add capabilities to our open-source offerings, because, as you know, a lot of people are predicting that by 2010 upward of 80 percent of companies will be using a combination of closed and open source code.

Gardner: We’ve certainly seen a precedent for that in platforms, and it will increase when we move up the stack, I am quite sure. Now, open source SOA provides a lot of choice. It provides risk reduction. It provides an ecology play -- pretty much what a lot of companies, developers, and architects have been asking for.

In general, it sounds like the way they want to go. Can we give them, in the meantime, some sense of what’s to come in the future? Oisin, you are close to some of these projects. Do you think that we will get to a point where open source will have an impact up and down the entire stack? I guess that would include business applications themselves. Or, do you think open source really is more appropriate on the infrastructure level? How do you see open source, in general, moving into the future, and what relevance and impact will that have for SOA?

Hurley: I strongly believe that the community-developed open source in SOA is going to have an impact not just on the infrastructure, but, as you say, from top to bottom. Right now, what you see is an awful lot of projects addressing SOA infrastructure-related issues, and it’s very natural to have several different projects addressing different aspects of those particular problems.

As time goes on, it’s going to be natural too that both of these projects will grow together and start addressing similar issues and perhaps merge. We have seen that happen with CXF and Celtix, and I predict this will be an ongoing thing. It’s a natural way to do it. And that’s from the infrastructure point of view.

Above and beyond that, there is a lot more that can involved with SOA. There’s the ESB part of this, and there is repository, governance, and policy adoption, and such things. You can see where it will be of great value to companies to have a cohesive structure that brings all of these pieces together.

This is something that we are aiming for in the SOA tools project as well. We are addressing different types of SOA developers, from the guys who are developing Java codes to implement services, all the way up to the guys who are using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) to draw pictures effectively to illustrate their business processes.

Gardner: You hinted at consolidation in these projects. Do you think that there will be a more standardized or perhaps integrated approach? How do you view the effective consolidation in this open source SOA maturation environment?

Hurley: As I previously mentioned, there are a lot of problems that are being addressed in different aspects of SOA. Where two different aspects of SOA may be somewhat similar, it’s quite normal to have different projects addressing those pieces. It’s also quite normal for them to grow together to provide another picture, another single approach to addressing those two aspects.

I don’t think that means that everything will all come together into one, single consolidation. There will always be a level of diversity there, because there will always be communities. There will always be people who want to develop things differently. That will actually drive the evolution of the quality, and will drive the innovation within SOA.

Gardner: We are about out of time. I think from our listener’s perspective, there is a lot to consider around these open-source approaches. What really is attractive to me is this notion of risk reduction and of choice. It will be unlike some previous technology revolutions and evolutions, if you will, where you were really locked-in to a monolithic and tightly structured environment that, once you were in, you were in for the long haul, and it was very difficult to extract yourself.

When you look at a component-based SOA model with open-source involved, it seems like your choices don’t just end once you have made the choice on infrastructure. You can go in and move about, make choices, back up, if you will, and go sideways, so to speak. That to me is probably what makes this more different than just about any other major infrastructure development over the past 15 or 20 years.

We’ve had object-oriented approaches and component-based approaches, but they were often within fairly rigid environments. We’ll go to you, Debbie, for the final word. Do you see that as well -- that we have more choice, not just at the beginning of our journey into an infrastructure approval process, but really throughout the process?

Moynihan: I absolutely do see that, and we’ve always been all about offering an incremental approach. I think with open source and SOA together that will be true going forward.

People will have choices, and it's not about making some huge decisions for a big hub that’s going to be in the center of everything, but rather smaller choices in a lot of different places, because of the evolution of standards, and because of this rapid innovation that’s happening at the community level, which, as Oisin mentioned, is pretty rigorous. It might seem chaotic from the outside, but it’s actually quite rigorous. And in the community-development approach there are also many vendors, which gives you choice as well. It’s not just a single vendor.

Gardner: Thanks very much. I am sure this is a set of the issues we are going to tracking closely over the coming years. I want to thank you both for helping us understand this at an important juncture, where SOA and open source are increasingly joined at the hip.

Joining us to discuss this sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast have been Oisin Hurley, a distinguished engineer at IONA Technologies, and also Debbie Moynihan, director of open source programs at IONA. Thank you all for listening. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Listen to the podcast here.

Podcast sponsor: IONA Technologies, Inc.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect podcast on open source and SOA. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2006. All rights reserved.