Open Source and Service-Orientated Architecture
Jan 28th, 2007 by John Gerber
“These blind men, every one honest in his contentions and certain of having the truth, formed schools and sects and factions…” — Buddha
“The Blind Men and the Elephant” is a classic fable. As the world of IT becomes more complex, the people in IT become more specialized. People become so focused in their areas, they lose the ability to see the big picture. Life becomes the fable. The fable is about a group of blind men who came upon an elephant. The first man, feeling the enormous leg, said, ‘This thing is very much like a tree.’ The second, standing near its ear, reached up and said, ‘This is a winnowing fan!’ ‘No,’ said a third as he grasped the moving trunk. ‘Be careful. This creature is a serpent.’ ‘I disagree,’ said a voice at the other end. ‘It is only a frayed piece of rope’. The last man commented, ‘You are all wrong. I have felt this thing on both sides and it is just a wall.’”
Let’s talk about two parts of the elephant, open source software (OSS) and service-orientated architecture (SOA). John Grimes, assistant secretary of Defense for networks and information integration/chief information officer, told the Network Centric Warfare conference in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, “As we go to SOA architecture, we keep the applications behind and share the data on the network, and it becomes very critical that data is understood by everyone.”
“It just eats our lunch every time we get into a proprietary situation, because it’s noncompetitive,” Grimes stated explaining that DOD will increasingly move to SOA because it benefits information sharing and acquisitions. Federal Computing Weekly has an article, “DOD’s Grimes: Our focus is on data” by Josh Rogin. In another article in FCW, Bob Brewinn wrote an article, “DISA Buying into SOA ‘Big Time’.” John Grimes is quoted as stating, “DOD spends too much time and money acquiring individual, highly-tailored systems.” He continues, stating, “It’s time for the department to stop buying things and start buying services.”
In an article in the Linux Insider title “Iona Tightens Open Source, SOA Bond,” Dana Gardner writes:
Open source and SOA are increasingly joined at the hip. These twins are developing in tandem, not sequentially, which is giving CIOs and architects a variety of choices for picking and choosing the projects and products that make up their SOAs.
Darryl K. Taft writes an article for eWeek title, “Web Services, SOA, and Open Source Converge.” Hub Vandervoort, chief technology officer at Sonic Software Corp., Bedford, Mass., was on a panel of heavy hitters at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street conference on Feb. 27. Vandervoort makes the point that, “SOA as a concept will challenge the whole concept of one throat to choke. SOA means federation and is built from federated components that are boundless.”
Han Zaunere, president of New York PHP, an organization for the Apache, MySQL and PHP community in New York, stated, “”In the long run, as far as looking at what you get, I think open source is more valuable.” He points out, “If I download [licensed] software and in two years it’s obsolete, I have no return on that. When you buy open-source support, the software is secondary.” Hiram Chirino, co-founder and director of architecture at LogicBlaze Inc., of Marina del Ray, Calif., believes that open-source software allows users to scale their systems more easily and cheaply because they can simply add more servers without having to worry about licensing costs.
Bob Sutor has written, and podcasted, extensively on the topic of open source. His four part series, is very interesting. I would recommend folks take a few moment to read it, paying particular attention to part 4, “The SOA Connection.” He covers:
Analyst at Forrester have written a report, “The Future of Enterprise Software.” Andy McCue has written the article “Open Source and SOA to Redefine Software Landscape” where he summarizes the report. The report stated: “Too many IT pros today reject the new ideas behind the four horsemen as ‘not ready for prime time’. Blanket dismissals of new ideas are defensive; IT executives should be looking instead for ways that the four horsemen can drive productive changes for business. These forces will define the future of enterprise software.” The “four horsemen” of commoditization are service oriented architecture (SOA), open source, software as a service and offshoring. Forrester predicts the four horsemen will lead to cheaper prices and a radical change in enterprise software landscape of the future.
SOA is ultimately about integration. It can be integration of open or closed source software packages. SOA brings agility to an enterprise. CEO and CIO are beginning to question the wisdom of getting locked into a software solution. When you take a solution, such as SAP, it is a solution that matches a complex problem with a complex solution. Annrai O’Tool, CEO of Cape Clear, tells the following story on Dana Gardner’s SOA trends webinar:
We have a couple of ex-PeopleSoft people working with us at Cape Clear, and they tell a great story about how they used to do sales pitches against SAP. They went to the customer with a small cup of quick-drying cement and poured it into a mold. By the time they finished the presentation, the cement is set and it has SAP written on it. They then say, “There you go, that’s the deal with SAP.” It is easy to design, but once you get your business process done, it is embedded in cement.
O’Tool points out that for many businesses, the business process is very difficult to change. He goes on to say, “SOA is all about how to use that application in new and more transparent ways that are easier to change and that deliver agility.”
Commercial solutions can have high up cost and high continuous operation costs. Even changing out hardware can end up costing a business significantly due to software licenses. In this rapidly changing IT environment, a company can easily find itself with a solution that no longer fits its business need, but it has too much invested to change course. Even worse, in time their software solution might no longer be actively developed as software companies change directions or go out of business. OSS helps reduce some of these risks. While there are costs, more of the expenditures goes into the companies own people. This helps create a work force better adapted to face a changing IT environment. Hub Vandervoort said it best when he stated “when you buy a software license you are paying for past innovation; when you buy open source, you’re investing in future innovation.”
[...] Gautama wrote, “These blind men, every one honest in his contentions and certain of having the truth, formed schools and sects and [...]