Financial Services in Germany Lead in BPM and SOA

This latest post on eBizQ discusses how financial services are ahead of many different industries in terms of SOA and BPM adoption. Since banks and other insurers are using SOA and BPM to achieve flexibility, agility, and transparency to drive overall business growth, the financial services industry will bounce back quicker than most.

The results come from an AG-sponsored survey of German operations which 64% of the financial companies surveyed viewed IT as a strategic resource. These results are monumental in the case of BPM, but what are similar results here in the US?

SOA Predictions for the New Year

Every year David Linthicum at InfoWorld makes his SOA predictions for the upcoming year (which he claims to be 90% right in the past few years). As detailed in this post on InfoWorld, here are his predictions in SOA for 2009. Do you agree?

1. The interest in cloud computing will drive many enterprises toward SOA.
2. The explosion in PaaS (platform-as-a-service) will leave many enterprise architects and CIOs scratching their heads.
3. The economy will recover, but most enterprises out there will focus on cost reduction.
4. There will be a larger focus on inter-domain SOA technology, or highly scalable and secure middleware technology that will provide scalable service and information access between the instances of SOAs within the enterprise, and
5. Jig will be up for poor SOA governance solutions out there.
6. Most failed SOA projects will be traced to unqualified SOA architects.
7. SOA the buzzword will become a bit less relevant and will begin to morph with concepts, such as enterprise architecture and cloud computing.

Collaboration is Vital in Enterprise Survival

I came across this video on YouTube where Bjoern Brauel, CTO and Vice President of the WebMethods business of Software AG, sheds some light about the importance of adopting Web 2.0 technologies within enterprise organizations.

An idea that seems to come up several times during this 7-minute video is when asked what web 2.0 at the end of the day is all about, Bjoern answers:

“One specific thing comes on top…and it’s Collaboration”

Take a look at this video to see how Web 2.0 software and SOA infrastructure can improve efficiency and help leverage existing skills within an organization.

Google’s Cloud: Is the Enterprise Truly Ready?

Google is often seen as a fierce competitor to IBM and Microsoft since it has seen a surge in numbers of adoption of Google Apps, but its enterprise cloud structure isn’t quite where it should be yet. Searching the blogosphere, I came across this article from eWeek, in which Dave Rosenberg, CEO of MuleSource, shares that he is rather unimpressed with Google’s cloud, commenting that just because something is hosted it doesn’t make it a truly shared infrastructure.

The difference here between Google and other software is that Google’s services are delivered through a web browser, whereas other companies offer traditional software and servers that must be installed by the client. Dave Rosenberg mentions:

"We're seeing a lot of people who are using our software or other software between external systems, but the idea that we're all moving to the cloud is still probably five years away."

Dave believes that there are certain reasons why the enterprise is slow to move into the “cloud”.

1. SAAS providers like Salesforce.com keep customers locked into their own technology, thus defeating the purpose of SOA.
2. The Google Apps engine is written in only one language, Python. If there was more language support, adoption from the enterprise would come much sooner.

Rosenberg’s solution is that one of the 3 big vendors IBM, Sun or Hewlett-Packard must build huge datacenters to kick-start the future of cloud infrastructure in the enterprise. Do you think that step will truly help mold the use of the “cloud” in the enterprise?