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How To Secure Enterprise Databases To Meet Compliance Requirements
March 1, 2006
Trends 2006: Enterprise Application Development
March 9, 2006
SOA Investment Strategies
March 29, 2006
If you're pursuing SOA, then you want your service providers to toe the line, and this has a significant impact on these firms. IT services firms are showing continued strong momentum for SOA projects and services in the global enterprise IT market.
To understand the state of the market for enterprise IT services for SOA, Forrester spoke with 10 leading IT service providers from around the globe. To capitalize on enterprise demand, all of these firms have assembled SOA capabilities and resources. They choose varying routes to match their offerings to the market: Some seek to lead their customers and offer lots of structured resources; others take a leaner approach, following patterns of demand and stressing their customer responsiveness. When you need to choose a service provider to help you with your SOA initiative, you should carefully match the provider's focus and approach with your own needs, resources, and objectives.
Business rules have gone from a technology that only a programmer could love, as well as being confined to specialist use cases, to a powerful platform that is often found coupled with SOA environments, helping to shape a new, more declarative programming model. Business rules platforms automate decisions, analysis to action, and policy compliance. This popularity is evidenced by the large volume of Forrester client inquiries on the topic and the strongly growing revenues of most business rules platform providers.
Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top business rules platform vendors. The results of our evaluation: Fair Isaac, ILOG, and Pegasystems are the leaders in general-purpose platforms for IT because of their comprehensive developer features, rules management features, and strong presence in the market.
However, specialist vendors like Corticon Technologies, Haley Systems, and Resolution EBS are the leaders in platforms for nonprogrammers and nontraditional rules development, which is just one of the new product segments that are emerging within the business rules platform market.
Forrester has included business rules technology within our definition of the application platform for several years, and the recent, more rapid growth in this market shows that this view is now playing out in the market. So just as with acquisitions in the SOA infrastructure context, expect to see further consolidation or extension of the major SOA platforms to fully embrace this concept of rules in the platform -- this year.
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Introduction
This edition of the Application Development and Infrastructure (ADI) First Look reflects the continuing disruption of the application programming model by service-oriented architecture (SOA), as well as a range of new ways to build or assemble applications from services. As this trend plays out, a blizzard of new application services creates management headaches that must be addressed, but it also opens up new possibilities that recast the way applications are developed and used -- from business rules platforms to the interaction platform. And as the model changes, so does the process, with new evidence that shows a strong correlation between SOA and new Agile processes for software construction.
Mike Gilpin
Vice President, Research Director
mikegilpin@forrester.com
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The Forrester Wave™: SOA And Web Services Management, Q1 2006
Within a strategic SOA, the most important layer is the business service one -- the inventory of SOA-based services that deliver your core business capabilities in a modular, incrementally composable way that is ready for connection to any business process, partner, supplier, or customer. SOA and Web services management solutions apply enterprise management concepts to this service interface layer, delivering flexibility by enforcing policy and monitoring activity for service requests before they are delivered to the business logic of the service.
You can obtain SOA management capabilities from dedicated products or from features embedded in other products. To assess the state of the SOA management market and see how the solutions stack up against one another, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top SOA management vendors across 106 criteria. The result: Two pure-play SOA vendors, AmberPoint and Actional (recently acquired by Sonic Software), lead the pack, but platform vendors like CA, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, TIBCO Software, and webMethods also have much to offer.
The acquisition of Actional by Sonic Software is just one of a series of transactions that are driving the consolidation of the SOA infrastructure market, which also includes CA-Adjoin, IBM-DataPower, Mercury-Systinet, and HP-Talking Blocks. Use this Forrester Wave to better understand the dynamics of this part of the market, as well as to choose a solution.
Agile Processes Enable SOA Success
As the programming model is disrupted, so are the processes that developers employ to create software using services. Agile software development processes and SOA accomplish two different yet related goals: Agile processes increase the effectiveness of a team's software delivery, while SOA increases the flexibility and reusability of the software itself.
Forrester's data shows a close correlation between adoption rates for Agile and SOA: Organizations with an enterprise-level commitment to SOA are twice as likely to use Agile processes. Firms are attracted to Agile and SOA for similar reasons, but there's more to this pairing than just common values. Enterprises experience more success with SOA when they avoid big, top-down delivery projects and instead get down in the trenches with an evolutionary approach.
Agile processes provide a basic structure for this kind of incremental delivery. If you're not already exploiting this connection, you should take a close look at its potential synergy.
The Interaction Platform: Widespread In 2006
Just as the programming model has changed, so has the interaction model. It is increasingly rare that a new application built in an SOA context would tightly couple a specific user interaction implementation with a specific application. The SOA approach is to factor an application front end from the back-end services it uses, supported by SOA frameworks and infrastructure. During 2005, a number of events moved packaged applications and services, application infrastructure, frameworks, and tools into closer alignment with this approach. However, only a few major vendors are explicitly positioning products as interaction platforms, with the rest embedding those capabilities in broader application platform suites.
Despite this low-key market status, organizations with requirements for rich clients, multichannel business processes, composite applications, collaboration, and other capabilities of interaction platforms should align architecture and purchasing plans with this trend to ensure the best fit of platform and tool strategy to meet these needs.
Information Fabric: Enterprise Data Virtualization
The ripples of SOA are also driving change in the world of data, moving toward information as a service. Enterprises still face growing challenges of using disparate sources of data managed by different applications, including problems with data integration, security, performance, availability, and quality. Business users want fast, real-time, and reliable information to make business decisions, while IT wants to lower costs, minimize complexity, and improve operational efficiency.
New technology is emerging that Forrester has labeled information fabric, a virtualized data layer that integrates heterogeneous data and content repositories in real time and delivers integrated information as a service. Products from several major vendors like BEA Systems, IBM, and Oracle -- as well as small innovators like Tangosol -- are evolving to provide information fabric, but today, custom integration is necessary to weave them together. The potential benefits of this technology are so great that you should start now to consider how you can use information fabric technology as it becomes more widely available and cost-effective.
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