Gijsbert’s BizTalk Notes

I’ll be presenting “ESB and Microsoft BI” on March 4th (audience is IT Managers) at the Application Platform event in Noordwijkerhout, NL (see http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/apo/default.aspx). My collegue Steef-Jan Wiggers will present “Monitoring the Business Integration Suite” on the 2nd day, targeted at architects and developers (March 5th).  My collegues Tomasso Groenendijk en Wesley Bakker will present “ESB for SharePoint” at the 2nd day as well.

This will be the most important Microsoft Application Platform event this year in the Netherlands, so make sure you’ll be there!

One of the best and funniest presentations (on technology) I’ve seen in the last couple of years was on SharePoint 2010 Search, done at the SharePoint 2010 Connections conference in Amsterdam earlier this week by Richard Taylor (I suspect he’s a stand-up comedian and not an architect :-)).  His argument was that “findability” is what’s important. Throwing search at everything is not going to solve your problems, but probably even making it worse. He’s a great proponent of “nuking” the archive and starting from scratch. Although very funny, and making life much easier, I think support of legacy information and systems is something that us IT folks will have to live with for the rest of our lives and beyond.

It was in the UK a couple of months ago, where I learned that one of the largest insurance companies in Europe actually finally pulled the plug from their ancient WANG computer only recently. The only way they were able to keep the thing running (actually serving a quite heavily used, core-to-the-business application) was by ordering the spare parts on eBay the last couple of years! Legacy is the diesel engine of the IT world.

I’m currently architecting an integration solution for a large retailer who’s WMS (Warehouse Mangement System)/ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system is also acting as the integration layer between more than 10 other supporting applications. The goal is to replace the WMS/ERP functionality with Dynamics and replace the integration functionality with the Microsoft ESB: BizTalk Server. This is where an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) is actually at its best: environments with lots of applications and an ever changing integration landscape. Much flexibility is needed here!

The ESB implementation for this customer will help them achieve their short term goals (replacing the ERP/WMS) and put them in a much better position to provide more sophisticated composite application functionality such as their portal for their (> 200) shop managers. The ESB enables the continued use of legacy applications and also makes it possible to phase out these applications at a right-for-the-customer pace.

Nuking legacy would be nice, however not realistic in the real-world… ESB helps us cope with it though.

The most refreshing presentation I got to see while attending the 2nd international SOA Symposium in the World Trade Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands was called “A survival kit in business model innovation”.

This presentation was about the really great inventors of great business models, starting with Henry Ford who invented the assembly line and mass production T-Ford and ending with Google who… well everyone knows that story. The message in all of this was that we can talk about new IT stuff like BPR, BPM, SOA, etc., including BOHICA (Bend Over Here It Comes Again :-)) to business people forever, but in the end in order to facilitate the business agility needed by great businesses we will need flexilibity, service and thus a Service Oriented Architecture throughout our business no matter what it’s called.

The presenter also mentioned MTBS  - Mean Time Between Surprises. MTBS is a great driver for SOA. The shorter the MTBS, the greater the need for SOA.

We should not talk about technology when selling SOA to customers. We should talk about their businesses, how the approach and architecture style that SOA encompasses can help their business become more agile so that they can become the next great, sustainable success.

Or, as Wayne Gretzky (Hockey Legend) said: “Go where the puck is going, not where the puck has been”. The only way to be able to do that as a business is integrate the Service Approach throughout your business. And SOA is just a piece of that puzzle that helps your IT infrastructure align with that approach.

(This is an English translation of my article published in the Dutch Computable.nl magazine)

Now that the causes of “the crisis” have become clear, more and more people are calling for “governance” to prevent this from happening again in the future. Because of the globalization these kind of “system faults” immediately have a global impact. Many companies have run into trouble because they have not been able to adjust quickly enough to the current econimic changes. Other companies are getting into trouble because they don’t have (enough) insight in what’s going on and thus don’t have the ability to make good and/or timely decisions. Flexibility, Insight and Control are the three main keywords for “World Economy 2.0″.

It’s been said before, but Charles Darwin and Adam Smith are still valid, also in IT. Prosperity is generated by a high level of specialization. Where in the past you had to do everything by yourself (hunt, fish, build house or hut) and there was no room for growth if you didn’t want to work harder yourself, the economy started to grow with the introduction of specialization. Specialization enables efficiency. Competition keeps everyone alert and can strenghten specialization or helps become companies “extinct”.

Large multinationals continuously try to deliver the best quality at the best price and at the same time create the best shareholder value by using the supply chain as efficiently as possible. Flexibility at these companies and their suppliers is essential. Apart from that, both parties will always need complete insight in their operational processes from both a technical and business perspective. Continuous measuring will help determine if everything still runs as per the policies and procedures and also enables monitoring business processes from a business point of view. Both parties can enormously profit from that.

The IT industry (more so, the IT consultancies) play a large role here. Service orientation is something that can only be implemented if the underlying automated business processes completely support it. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a  necessary architecture principle and makes it possible to implement Business Process Management (BPM) which in its turn enables flexibility of business processes.

Many articles have been written already on the SOA do’s and don’ts and most of them have been based on real life experience and thus have been very helpful to the System Integrators to create best practices. Just like in the past we have to go through the phase of ‘desillusion’ (it’s not exactly doing what we thought it should be doing, mostly because of start up issues using new, not completely thought-out technology) before we can really see the value add. At the moment we are somewhere in the middle of the phase of ‘enlightenment’ and after this we go to the ‘productivity’ phase.

Because SOA will become the underlying architecture for all automated processes it is often the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB, the ‘plumbing’ of every SOA) that is the center of everything. This is an excelllent location to implement and enable Governance (=control) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) / Business Intelligence (BI) (=insight). Governance products are at the moment relatively grown up I think. BAM and BI in combination with SOA still need to go through the phase of ‘desillusion’….

Service Oriented Architecture is a ‘paradigm shift’ where the men are separated from the boys with regard to architects, just like what happened with developers when we made the shift from procedural to object oriented programming. SOA will have an even bigger impact on how companies will implement IT solutions and will prove necessary to generate even more prosperity for all in the future!