Demystifying enterprise IT, part 1: SOA - Interview with John Osborn (iTWire podcast)

Tony Austin
Friday, 10 October 2008 05:57

IT Industry - Market

Getting back to the real purpose of this article, the first in my series of what you might call heavyweight IT architectures.

These are typically — but neither exclusively nor necessarily — implemented by medium to large enterprises (of any sort, commercial, government, not-for-profit). Nevertheless they do affect each and every one of us via the end-product services they deliver.

In this series of articles, I'll be covering such topics, then, as SOA, web services, cloud computing and the like. I'll be talking with industry specialists and experts from Australia and other countries, trying to understand what they mean in practice and clarify any ambiguities and misconceptions (of which there are plenty).

We kick off with SOA, standing of course for Service Oriented Architecture — probably more correctly spelled with a hyphen: Service-Oriented Architecture.

I talked in depth about SOA with John Osborn, who's the Australian country manager for Information Builders and has been working with software integration technologies for quite some time.

He said: "Information Builders enables agile information solutions with business intelligence (BI) and integration technologies. Our flagship WebFOCUS platform – the world’s most widely utilized BI solution – is flexible, scalable, and secure. It permeates every level of the extended enterprise and delivers actionable information through a simple user experience. iWay Software, an innovator of enterprise integration, solves complex integration problems quickly using pre-built components – enabling minimum custom programming with a flexible enterprise architecture that can adapt to long-term change."

Please listen to the podcast with John Osborn find out what he has to inform us about SOA and related matters, such as:

• - What SOA essentially is (and isn't)
• - What relationship SOA has with Web Services
• - Where AJAX fits into the picture
• - Whether or not SOA is a good fit for small enterprises or only for large ones
• - IT Maturity and the impact of modern usage models
• - The complexity resulting from the evolution and legacy construction of applications
• - Large business environments and the imperatives for flexible business functions and processes
• - User interface advances and the impact on integration projects
• - Control and governance of service availability as the technologies become more productised and simple to implement
• - The emergence of strategic information requirements that must now be merged with real time transactions

You can download the podcast from here (MP3 format, file size 8.3 MB, duration 21:15).