iSeries ISVs React to SOA Standardization Initiative

by Mary Lou Roberts

On December 1, IBM announced it had joined with seven other major industry players--BEA Systems, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP, Siebel Systems, Sybase, and Zend Technologies--in an effort to create standardized specifications for services oriented architecture. SOA is the trendy new model for creating and implementing applications in heterogeneous environments, and SOA can be applied to both new applications and existing ones, breaking components of the applications into "business services" that can be unified across unlike platforms, regardless of development language.

To understand the basics of SOA and the significance of this announcement that brought together the likes of SAP, Oracle, and IBM (but not, notably, Microsoft or Sun Microsystems), you might want to take a look at the article I wrote last week. This week, I want to take a look at the significance to the iSeries community, if any, of what this group is all about.

As background, if you've thought about this topic at all, you're probably aware that end-user iSeries shops are not beating anyone's doors down to jump on the SOA bandwagon. That's largely because there aren't a lot of end users engaged in major new application development projects for the iSeries. While legacy applications can be "componentized" to participate in a SOA initiative, this only makes sense when they are being brought into an active--typically Web-enabled--environment where they will be communicating and working together with other applications, written in disparate languages, and running on diverse platforms, often over a broad geography.

So who cares? For the moment, the ISVs do and should. Ultimately, the end users of iSeries solutions will push the responsibility for SOA compliance off onto their application vendors, and hold them responsible for making those applications run in diverse environments. iSeries shops, no matter how small, will expect the applications they purchase to be SOA-compliant so they can "talk" with other systems both within and outside their organizations. The days are long gone when there are "islands" of computing that don't speak with other systems or other companies in the supply chain.

Some iSeries shops don't get especially excited about conversations about "modernization." They simply don't want to learn all this great, new techy stuff; they just want to run their business. After all, that's why they have the iSeries in the first place. The darn thing just keeps running and they don't want to or have to roll around in the IT dirt. Isn't that why they bought those great packaged solutions in the first place?

Having said that, many iSeries shops don't have packaged applications, and therefore they do care--and the iSeries base in general will increasingly care about SOA as time goes on--that their software supplier is paying attention to modernization. Some shops are still running green-screen applications that were coded 20 years ago, and they're happy with that. But a few things are certain about those dinosaurs. First, those applications may be doing some of the heavy lifting in the back office, but most of them are not touching customers, end users, and partners in the supply chain--all system "users" who were not part of the business process in the same way one or two decades ago as they are today. Second, sooner or later, those applications are going to be replaced, and when that time comes, the expectation will be that the software supplier will offer a solution that will fit into the way in which the company runs its business today. Most likely, that will include integration with other systems that are not running on the iSeries, and communication with other applications that are running on other platforms and written in different languages, often at companies in other locations. Finally, that wonderful iSeries is not going to be around long if it can't be a player in the wider enterprise. If the iSeries doesn't host applications that can play nicely with others, it's only a matter of time until the platform itself shuffles off into oblivion. Luckily, the iSeries does play nicely.

In short, while you may not be signing up your staff for SOA training, you'd better hope that your software vendor is. That's why most of the major iSeries ISVs are moving into this SOA Wild West with guns a-blaring. Even though users aren't beating down their doors yet, demanding SOA-compliant applications, ultimately their ability to componentize the applications you are already running and ensure that the new releases of software yet to come meet that requirement, they probably aren't going to be competitive for long.

So, getting back to the joint initiative announced by IBM and their seven partners last week, how are the iSeries ISVs reacting? The overall response is extremely positive. I interviewed a few of them, and here's what they had to say.

Daniel Magid, president of Aldon, believes that SOA has tremendous potential to make IT organizations more agile and responsive. "Internally, it promises to make it easier for businesses to integrate all of their applications and provide richer process automation and management information. Externally, the loose coupling of SOA makes it dramatically simpler for business applications in one organization to talk directly to applications in another. However, in order to make all this work, there need to be standards for how services are described, how you access them, what parameters they accept, the format of the messages they can receive, etc. To be truly useful, these standards need to be independent of platform, operating environment, and database. The importance of this initiative is demonstrated by this announcement that a variety of the major vendors are getting together to define those standards."

SOA requires a robust set of widely accepted standards, tools, and technologies, Magid says, that can be used in assembling and interfacing applications. "One of the problems today is that there are too many techniques available for companies to create services. This group is trying to solve both problems: establishing standards, and ensuring that they are widely accepted."

This is a "double positive" for Aldon, says Magid. "We have already begun to deliver services within our application suite, allowing customers to access our product functions through services-based interfaces based on standards like SOAP and XML. The creation of ubiquitous standards supported by the major vendors will allow us to ensure that our services are accessible to the widest possible range of users." None of this is new to Aldon, Magid reports, since they have been architecting their change management solutions to support service-based development since their inception.

David Precopio, vice president, product management and marketing for Skyway Software applauds the efforts underway to create SOA standards. "This initiative takes the right step toward 'true' SOA. SOA will change the way companies do business today, and it will allow companies to interact and collaborate with partners on business processes." Right now, he points out, each vendor in the group has separate and proprietary assembly, orchestration, and deployment tools. "This is very confusing and costly for the vendors as well as the customers. By forming this group, the vendors acknowledge it is in everyone's best interest to work together. IBM has built its business by understanding customer's needs and challenges. The lack of standardization has been an inhibitor to the adoption of SOA. IBM recognizes that challenge and is moving toward helping customers get over that hurdle."

There will be a real benefit to iSeries users, Procopio believes, as well as to his company, which sells SOA-style development tools. "It will validate our offering and increase interest. It will also provide us with opportunities to fill in the gaps in other vendors' solution suites such as a path to move legacy developers who retain vast amounts of critical business knowledge into becoming business service developers without having to go through the long learning cycle that traditional developers go through today.

John Siniscal, president of LANSA is also glad to see IBM driving this standards initiative. "Anything that makes is easier for systems and applications to communicate together more effectively is goodness." However, as others have, he points out that Microsoft is not a part of the group, which is very J2EE-focused. "It begs the question of how it will integrate with Windows platforms. Let's hope there is not a J2EE standard and a .NET standard."

In Siniscal's opinion, the jury is still out on how these standards will affect the iSeries. "It will depend on how IBM implements it. WebSphere components are often delivered to the iSeries later than for other platforms. And if it's dependent on having WebSphere on the machine, then the majority of iSeries users will not be able to use it any time soon." He looks forward, though, to the publishing of the standards so that iSeries ISVs can begin building conformity into their products. "This will be a real positive."

Brian Sterrett, vice president of business development for Intentia International's Americas unit, sees this initiative as a natural step for vendors supporting large organizations with a large IT staff doing custom development and integration. He also points out that this effort could be helpful to companies like his because it increases the value and utility of investments they have already made and continue to make in SOA for their enterprise applications.

Sterrett says that manufacturers and distributors running Intentia's Movex on the iSeries will eventually benefit from easier integration with other specialized and legacy applications. However, he acknowledges that "honestly, today, the mid-sized iSeries companies just aren't thinking that seriously about SOA. We believe this will be important for them in the future, but most mid-sized companies we serve haven't yet realized the value that SOA offers." But, given Intentia's heavy investment in SOA, he's happy to see the development of this initiative. "This group, or anything similar that promotes SOA, validates the effort we began several years ago to put Movex on a service-oriented foundation. Widespread industry involvement in SCA basically validates that decision."

It clearly helps IBM as an application infrastructure vendor to stay close to standards initiatives, Sterrett points out. "As a business partner with applications running on WebSphere since 1999, it is good to see IBM participating. When they get better, we get better."

Tom Herman, manager of new business development for looksoftware agrees that the impact of this initiative "will be nothing but positive. It will be another step in creating a tightly integrated environment of either Java, .NET, or RPG and COBOL. At the core, SOA is about reuse of working components and platforms, bringing them together to solve business issues without major rewrites or upgrades."

The benefits of SOA will extend to the iSeries and his own company, Herman predicts. "Since we announced our SOA development functionality at COMMON Fall 2005, we will see a positive benefit to the growing trend of SOA. It's clear that IBM should participate in a group like this in order to ensure their platforms and operating systems are considered in the standard and to keep decisions from being made that will close them out in the future of SOA."

Duncan Kenzie, president of BCD Software's technical support, raises two questions. First, he points out that there are already language-neutral specifications in place for SOA, such as WDSL, SOAP, and other SML variants. What, then, will the additional standards look like? Second, he poses the omni-present question about the absence of Microsoft from the group. "Without Microsoft's buy-in, at least, I don't really see this as an industry standard."

As far as the iSeries world goes, Kenzie points out that "most of the iSeries customer base is so far behind the eight-ball on SOA and Web services that I see this as having very little effect on them. Most iSeries shops need to start using SOA in the most primitive ways--to exchange data between servers in as simple and expedient manner as possible, even if this means not adhering to yet another set of so-called 'standards.' We've seen the failure of Java (and WebSphere) to establish the benefits of these standards. They are just too complicated to implement, with minimal benefit."

To be sure, SOA is not the leading issue in iSeries shops. And it's not clear that the iSeries is getting much mind-share from IBM as far as this initiative goes. Last week, in an interview with Karla Norsworthy, vice president of software standards for IBM's Software Group, she stressed that the work of the partners would take a multi-language approach. "While Java will be an important part [of this SOA initiative], we've also included C++, PHP, and we'll be headed all the way to languages like COBOL. Java will continue to be one of the key languages that these specs are targeted for, but it won't be the only one." I asked whether or not RPG would be included. She didn't know. "I'll have to ask about that. It's certainly not out of the question," she said, "but I don't think it's on the near-term radar screen."

When asked about SOA's impact on the iSeries community, Norsworthy responded: "Clearly iSeries customers now have the benefits of most of the Web app server functions that we are talking about today. So, I assume that all this will be delivered on that platform."

If IBM is truly serious about having the iSeries play a key role in the enterprise, the company would do well to make that commitment loud and clear. The iSeries cannot survive--much less grow-- if it is an island apart from the rest of the IT and application infrastructure. If SOA represents the way in which applications will be built in the future, then the iSeries, RPG, and i5/OS had better be integral players.

Mary Lou Roberts, a 35-year veteran of the information systems industry, is a new contributor to IT Jungle. In addition to her work as a reporter in the iSeries space, she has spent her career as a marketing and communications professional working exclusively with information technology publications and companies. She can be reached at WriterNewf@aol.com.

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