IBM clouds its SOA strategy

While IBM's core message this year is “A Smarter Planet,” the announcement of several cloud-based offerings stole the spotlight at its annual SOA Impact conference this week. They included CloudBurst, a new appliance for automating deployment of WebSphere images to private clouds, and BlueWorks, a new cloud-based BPM offering for simplifying defining and modeling business processes. In these cases, the cloud is the means, not the end, towards the goal of simplifying key aspects of developing and deploying SOA. However, IBM still has some work to do. In their first iteration, these two products add some complexity to the goal of making things simple.
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CloudBurst is a promising first step towards simplifying SOA
Given all the recent attention on cloud computing, it shouldn't be surprising that two of IBM's most prominent announcements coming out of its annual SOA conference were cloud-oriented. However, the tie-in was purely coincidental. The real goal of both offerings is to attack the complexity for which SOA and business process management (BPM) are known.

IBM's new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance stores up to a few hundred pre-loaded images of the hypervisor edition of WebSphere, which can then be deployed to what IBM terms a “private cloud.” That refers to an undifferentiated group of servers anywhere inside the firewall where WebSphere images could be provisioned or killed as appropriate. Although IBM is currently restricting deployment to the private cloud use case, there's no reason this couldn't be targeted at public clouds like Amazon EC2 if additional security and management measures were added.

CloudBurst uses several IBM software pieces, including Rational tools for configuring WebSphere images, and Tivoli agents for provisioning them, if the customer uses Tivoli. Alternatively, CloudBurst also provides its own change management capabilities; they could make the appliance self-managing, but at the potential cost of adding yet more management overlap if the organization already has some infrastructure management automation. Although built on similar hardware to IBM's existing DataPower XML appliances, CloudBurst uses different firmware.

CloudBurst could simplify the often arduous process of deploying new WebSphere virtual images. However, as organizations that must manipulate large numbers of WebSphere images are also likely to have significant XML message traffic, it is highly likely that CloudBurst appliances will be used by the same customers that also use DataPower boxes. In such instances, CloudBurst would contribute to appliance sprawl, making infrastructure management more complex.

Nevertheless, we should credit IBM for a first step here, as deployment of middleware has never proven simple. However, if you're going to make things simple, why go half way? How about putting the DataPower and CloudBurst boxes together? And while we're at it, why not throw in WebSphere Registry/Repository (WSRR) so there's no need to add yet another layer for service lookup and management.

Although it would be tempting to call it “SOA in a box,” that misses the point that SOA is architectural practice, not product. But placing all of the functions that are useful to deploying and operating an SOA architecture in a box may not be such a bad idea as long as developers don't forget about the architecture.

BlueWorks is also a good first step towards simplifying BPM deployment
Another hurdle associated with SOA is the complexity of modeling business processes as part of a BPM implementation. Although you can have BPM without SOA, or vice versa, they are quite complementary, as SOA architecture provides the flexibility that can make BPM implementation effective.

IBM's introduction of BlueWorks is the latest in a string of offerings from vendors aimed at simplifying how the business defines what it does and what it requires from software. Like Software AG's recently announced AlignSpace, BlueWorks is a cloud-based offering that combines social computing collaboration with easy-to-use tools for defining business process artifacts. It supports the creation of strategy maps representing goals, actions, and measures for a business activity, and provides access to community content and pre-built templates for BPMN process definitions. Resulting process maps are then exported to an SOA sandbox which contains a BPM modeling tool, and there is a capability to simulate execution of the process as well.

Again, this is a good start. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, why not go all the way and make this a complete platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, where you could develop and then execute your business processes?

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BY Tony Baer
Source：Ovum

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