Gijs’ BizTalk Notes

My company motion10 has been elected #1 Great Place to Work in the category Small and Young Enterprised. So proud!

I was awarded Microsoft MVP for the 6th consecutive year today!

Service Oriented Architecture and Object Oriented Programming have a lot in common. Among other things, both terms contain too many words. Are there more similarities?

Service Oriented Architecture should just be called Architecture and SOA should be called A. The same goes for OOP. Just P or Programming is sufficient because you won’t find many developers anymore who don’t write object oriented code.

Just like with Architecture the “contract first” principle is very important for Programming; the contract is created first before the component or service is implemented. This will increase the interoperability because the intent of the component or service will always be clear. It also makes it easier to implement it to perfectly match the contract which will increase the quality.

Apart from “contract first” there are two more principles that I want to highlight here: Abstraction and Reusability (for the other 6 principles - read Principles of Service Design by Thomas Erl).

Abstraction is important because the implementation of the component or service can be masked for who or what invokes the service or component.

Reusability is of course important because it lowers implementation costs of new business processes. It can be implemented by making sure that the component or service does not know anything about its context.

You’ll also see that the other 6 principles also apply to both services and components.

The only difference is that components are “welded together” by the programmer who creates code using a text editor and services are invoked by business processes that can be visually designed using a Business Process Management environment (using Orchestration, Business Rules, etc.). With the former, the programmer creates procedural code, with the later the business analyst creates solutions by “clicking together” services.

But, if this is the only difference… isn’t it about time to combine these two paradigms into a new solution? The best of both worlds? P will deliver reusable, abstract components and A will deliver orchestration of the components. An we’ll call it: Software Architecture 2.0 or SA 2.0?

Cloud computing will give a larger group of companies the ability to automate at a serious level and therefore become able to further professionalize. Apart from the real mainstream cloud solutions such as email handling and social media, more and more will become possible by using combinations of online customer relationship management and collaboration and productivity environments suchs as Microsoft’s CRM,  SharePoint and Lync. These products can provide excellent composite functionalities that can be hosted in the cloud very easily and companies can also gain their biggest cloud advantages there because of the ability of universal access and the virtually unlimited scalability.

For the larger enterprises the Cloud primarily provides the means to integrate a vast number of smaller customers and suppliers in a very scalable and standardized way into their supply and demand chains. By connecting the internal business processes (behind the firewall) with the Integration Services in the Cloud (for example through Windows Azure AppFAbric) the smaller parties can be connected to these business processes in a standardized and secure way.

I don’t see the larger enterprises hosting their core processes in the Cloud in the foreseeable future. Rather, private cloud solutions will probably be used here, using the same technology but run by the company’s own people and in its own environment. Private clouds are less (quickly) scalable, but much more secure.

My vision is that the trend  for the near future with regard to Cloud Computing will be that smaller and medium-sized companies are really going to use it as an integral part of their total set of IT solutions and thereby lessening the maintenance burden for the more standard solutions. By doing that they can focus more on tailormade solutions and really innovate there in order to set themselves apart from the competitors and become leaders in their business!