BPM / SOA Consortium Insights

@ Gartner AADI: SOA Success Stories: Delivering Business Value and a Go-Forward Foundation in a Tough Economic Climate

The SOA Consortium hosted two end-user panels at Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit this week.  Notes taken during our SOA Success Stories panel follow.  Read about our Cloud Computing in the Real World panel here.

Session Abstract: Tough economic climates call for tough decisions. Instead of jeopardizing the future by cutting out all initiatives mentioning architecture, the organizations represented on this panel continue to invest in their business-driven SOA initiatives, resulting in near-term business value and creating a viable foundation for continued business optimization and growth initiatives. In this session, SOA Consortium and CIO magazine case study contest winners, along with leading members of the SOA Consortium, will share insight from their SOA success stories, including the business challenge addressed, achieved ROI, business participation, lessons learned and how they have, or plan to, incorporate complementary techniques such as BPM, event processing, business analytics and cloud computing.

Panelists: Tom Keen, CTO of BlueStar Energy, Leo Shuster, Director of Application Development at Safeguard Properties, John Woolbright, CIO for Omega Financial and Scott Metzger, CTO TransUnion Interactive

Moderators: Richard Soley, OMG/SOA Consortium and Daniel Sholler

Introductory Statements

Leo Shuster: Prior to Safeguard, was running SOA program at National City Bank.  National City has since been absorbed PNC.  National City was industry recognized leader in SOA, post-merger, PNC shut-down the SOA program.  However, everything that was delivered from the SOA program is running in production, adding value to the business.

Tom Keen: BlueStar Energy was a SOA Consortium 2009 Case Study Contest Winner, see the write-up of their winning case.  Took an engineering approach to this project.  Iterative plan for value delivery.  Technology stack is open source, about 98%.  Spent a lot of time on resiliency.  View the technology stack as temporal.  Some has been replaced out already, replacement also open source. 

Business success: explosion of product, entered new territories, new demographic market, all done in initial timeframe estimate.  Have had very little IT attrition with this approach.  Currently on 4th generation of NextStar.

Scott Metzger: Startup developing capabilities that needed to be delivered across multiple channels, in multiple regions.  Some capabilities were developed internally, others were third party sourced.  Startup was acquired by TransUnion Interactive.  The business, technical and change requirements were best met with SOA.  Now, some of the services are being offered to customers via the cloud, by creating APIs into the services.

John Woolbright: Previously, John was with Synovus Financial.  Synovus was the grand winner in the 2008 SOA Consortium Case Study contest, see the write-up.  John shares that Synovus is well positioned with SOA platform to emerge from economic downturn.

Q&A

Q: For Leo, why didn’t the new management embrace SOA? 

A: Cultural issue with acquiring bank.  PNC is siloed.  As acquirer, there was a bit of not-invented-here (NIH).

Q: For Scott, was your technology approach a reason for the acquisition?

A: Yes.  The agility the infrastructure offered allowed the acquiring organization to meet agility and growth goals.  Scott’s team, framework and approach became the “tail that wagged the dog”, driving SOA adoption within the acquiring company.

Q: Types of services, exposing services externally?

Leo: Majority of services were internal.  The services weren’t directly tied to revenue streams, like Synovus’ and TransUnion’s services are.

Q: BlueStar had enterprise architecture initiative at center of SOA, was that true for other panelists?

John: Started with centralized strategy, enterprise (shared) ESB.  Learned that a federated approach, with well-defined domains of control, and well-defined standards, was a better approach.  So, EA approach, but not centralized strategy.  EA provided investment protection, such as establishing contracts with key vendors.  Having well defined service standards saved them money in contracting the development of services.

Q: SOA as management approach versus technology approach?

Tom: A major building block in their success was business engagement.  The business has accepted responsibility for the delivery of NextStar.  The business speaks to IT in terms of business services, architecture and refactoring, when discussing new business opportunities and the work required to attain the new business capability (new product, new market).  Tom has so much support that asking for a 23% budget increase resulted in a 68% budget increase.  The business believes in the value of the architecture and program and understands that continued investment enables continued revenue growth.

Q: Role of master data management, BPM, etc in SOA success?

Leo: Successful SOA depends on services.  BPM became ancillary because the services layer was in place.  Services were created to expose master data.

John: Applied process thinking to the project.  How do you break out a project into a process approach.  How do you orchestrate the work across domains.

Tom: Leverage business rules, semantics from BPM in SOA.

An audience question on technology problems.  The theme of answers was the complexity of the distributed computing environment.  In one example, an unknown firewall blocked a service request for weeks.  In another, there was a code check-in miss on a bug fix.  Subsequent version of code reintroduced bug.  The key is to have visibility into your environment.  Integrate your service development processes into existing code and change management practices.

Another question called out the need for a proactive approach to SOA security.  Plan a security framework, don’t append security as an after thought. 

Another called out need to isolate impact of version or provider changes.  Implement a proxy layer to allow for seamless upgrades and backwards compatibility.

@ Gartner AADI: End-User Panel: Cloud Computing in the Real World

The SOA Consortium hosted two end-user panels at Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit this week.  Notes taken during our Cloud Computing in the Real World panel follow.

Session Abstract: Is your organization considering cloud computing? Are you tired of hearing about simplistic (email and calendaring), enterprise irrelevant (Twitter, Facebook), and extreme (Google Datacenter) use cases? You aren’t alone. In this session, government and enterprise practitioners will discuss the cloud computing use cases they are considering, actively pursuing, and rejecting. In addition to the use case specifics, the panelists will share insights on financial benefits, true implementation costs, assessing and managing risk, governance, standards and their cloud computing wish list.

Moderators: David W. Cearley, Gartner and Richard Soley, OMG / SOA Consortium

Panelists: Clark Dorman of Next Century, Andy Lapkin of Kelley Blue Book, Joseph Larizza of Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust

Introductions:

Clark Dorman: Specific use case, analyst in DoD collects a lot of images, genetic algorithm to review images.  Use cloud computing to optimize processing.  Started with in 18k server, got output in 8-14 days.  Now, use Amazon EC2, 100 images at a time, 12 hours, get run done for $130.  There is an opportunity to parallelize further and reduce runtime in half again.

Picked EC2 because it is the biggest.  Clark mentions Eucalyptus as way to hedge against lock-in.  Use Appistry to orchestrate startup and runtime execution.

Andy Lapkin: Looking at cloud, on premise they pay for availability, not for use.  Build KBB.com to peak.  This is expensive, for off-hours, plus hedge against growth.  Sized for extra 25%.  Example of unexpected traffic was “cash for clunkers” program.  A second use case is in data management.  KBB has a lot of data not shown on website that is used to produce website.  Also, data provider to car dealerships, etc.  Data management work is done in batch.

KBB uses Azure and SQL Azure for their cloud computing environment.  KBB is a Microsoft shop.  Now, testing KBB.com failover site in Azure in SQL Azure.  Biggest lesson learned: Transition to cloud is as good as your application maintenance. 

Joseph Larizza:  Customers are high net worth individuals, mostly from financial services industry.  The IT budget is a shoestring, similar to community banking.  Joseph has big banking background.  Some providers Digital Insight, Rackspace.  Full banking site, portal to members, all in the cloud.  Core competency is banking, not data center management.  Cost is critical factor.

Risk Question: Look at it as risk ledger.  Responsiveness of provider vs. key employee risk.  Compliance can be provided by cloud, more effectively than if done internally.  Surprise, the amount of support you need to do, such as patching, backups, security.

Online banking application, could have built their own.  But, not core competency.  Could never keep up with feature/function of a Digital Insight.  Instead, use Digital Insight, which is an Intuit company.  Core banking platform is all in the cloud. 

Implemented single sign-on across these applications; does have Fieldpoint branding.

Q: Security Concerns?

Joseph: Rackspace compliance and security, third party providers, learn their procedures.  They are careful about what data is stored in the cloud.  Didn’t elaborate further on this.

Andy: Security isn’t biggest concern, given the type of business application.

Clark: VPN on their side, SSH into Amazon.  Data isn’t classified, but still don’t want to “leak all over”.  Data is encrypted on the fly.  No data resides in the cloud.  Data is brought up at startup.  Have very specific startup process.  (Again, use Appistry)

Q: SLA with Amazon?  Is the data really gone when the images are shut down?

Clark: Matter of trust, trust that policy and agreements will be adhered to.  Security isn’t a thing, it’s a process.

Q: Cost of moving the data, latency?

Clark: For this use case, 6-8 hours of processing, 20 minutes worth of data movement isn’t an issue. 

Q: What is your interest in standards in the cloud computing space?  Cloud interoperability?  Avoid lock-in?

Joseph: Very interested in the ability to move cloud to cloud, for risk management, and to move work closest to current customer base (time zone).

Clark: Want to develop application at highest level you can.  Make the lower levels someone else’s problem.

Andy: Not moving everything to the cloud.  Will always have a mixed model.  Will always have datacenter to fall back on.  The real issue is the operations work to move from running on one cloud to another.

Q: New job roles?

Andy: Monitor the same way as on-premise.  Use Keynote for monitoring. 

Joseph: Think about operations (backup and security) differently.  Can’t just stick equipment in the mix.  Don’t have control over the equipment.

Clark: Systems administration changes to cloud administration.  Don’t worry about hardware layer, but still need to manage the environment (to deliver the application).

Q:  Old wine in new bottles?

Clark – what’s new is dynamic nature, speed that you can do things, low costs.  8 cents for CPU hour. 

Andy: Spin up new instance in 6 minutes.  Scale, knowing you can serve 14 million visitors a month.

Q: What needs to improve in cloud computing?

Andy: Azure needs third party support for management tools.  Doesn’t want to write his own.  Needs tooling to sift through all the log data.

Q: [for Clark]  Your project is a proof of concept, if DoD accepts this product, will it remain in the cloud, or move somewhere else?

Clark: It is up to the government to decide.  The government does have a few clouds – NIST, DISA Race, and GSA Apps.gov.  This application could land on existing government cloud.

Q: [for Andy] Considered running base load on premise, then burst peak to the cloud?

Andy: Something they are considering.

Q: [for Joseph] Said want to get to zero servers, does that mean Opex will outpace Capex?  Is that ok?

Joseph: Not for their size.  In general, economic model is service first, no related employee expense, if not appropriate, have inside.

Andy: KBB uses SaaS applications to run business, such as CRM (Salesforce.com)