CRMBuyer hailed Microsoft as one of the leading drivers of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA):
“Microsoft was a pioneer and driver of many of the Web services standards that form the essence of SOA [...]
Because of Web services, developers are gaining more choices than ever
for leveraging common services in order to provide client/server
applications and Web applications, and for loosely coupled services
that tie Office applications (or browsers) with standardized
application interfaces and XML data.”
The message is: Build in .NET and be able to embrace more services, applications, resources and data.
Dovetail
Software’s platform is .NET, as many of you know. We wrote our
applications from scratch to run on .NET, precisely because of the ease
of integration and rapid development this platform affords. Like
Microsoft, we’ve been quietly developing our software (in policy if not
in code) according to SOA principles for a
long time now. Our architecture allows users of Clarify™ data to create
hybrid applications, for example, using Web services for customized
data access.
One of our customers who deployed our SDK development platform reports satisfaction in using the Dovetail Web Services
because of its ability to “Respond to Market Changes Quickly”. They
also praised WebLogic/SOAP/.NET because of its ability to connect with
multiple databases and systems to obtain customer information such as
loyalty points, service order history, etc. Essentially they can
provide each of their agents a portal view across multiple customer
data sources.
We developed our applications because we
believe that Amdocs is ill equipped to service the evolving needs of
the Clarify install base for thin clients, Web portals, and remote data
access. But there are two sides to the SOA coin.
“Web services are great for a lot of things, but SOA doesn’t always mean Web services. Marshaling and unmarshaling XML, processing SOAP
envelopes, etc. are expensive operations. There are many places where a
native service call fits the bill, and it’s almost always more
efficient. In addition, native service calls can be treated much like
Web services; they can be discoverable and have dynamically changeable
bindings.” – tightly coupled vs. loosely coupled options
In 2003 Gartner predicted that “by 2008, SOA
will be a prevailing software-engineering practice, ending the 40-year
domination of monolithic software architecture.” As we noted in the
paragraph above, prevailing doesn’t mean exclusive, but certainly the
dominance of SOA seems to be coming to pass, as analysts and commentators review the year 2006, and make their predictions for 2007.
“The big vendors seemed incapable of bringing advanced
products to market, at least in part because what the market seems to
want is software as a service (SaaS), and that’s hard to deliver on
platforms that were developed in the client-server era. Those solutions
are even harder to deliver if your business model focuses on big
license fees.” – Was That a Tipping Point We Just Lived Through?
Respected SOA evangelist Dave Linthicum predicts in a podcast that SOA
and Web 2.0 will converge visibly next year, so that enterprises need
to adapt for integration not just within the enterprise but also to
incorporate external services from and through the Web. – SOA Predictions for 2007
The future looks bright for the agile.
