SOPERA will announce its Eclipse SOA initiative (see homepage and press release) tomorrow at the EclipseCON in Santa Clara, CA. With this initiative, SOPERA will develop an integrated, coherent SOA platform inside Eclipse. As of today, there are only individual SOA components available through different, widespread, uncoordinated Eclipse projects like Swordfish, STP, and BPEL. With the Eclipse SOA initiative, there will be an integrated Eclipse package that can be downloaded from the Eclipse Website to create service oriented applications. Part of this initiatve will be the development of a new Service Registry/Repository in the context of a new Eclipse project. Currently, all available open source registry/repository projects are not qualified for enterprise level usage.
Even though the Eclipse SOA initiative is actually a SOPERA initiative, SOPERA is looking for cooperation from other SOA-interested companies and Eclipse members. Such cooperation will guarantee that the emerging Eclipse SOA platform will be developed closer to the market needs and can be available even sooner. There was a discussion with the EMO (Eclipse Management Organization) yesterday evening to decide on an organizational structure into which the Eclipse SOA initiative can be embedded. It seems that an “Industry Working Group” will provide the perfect organizational structure for this initiative, as flexible governance structures can be defined individually as needed.
We do not expect that traditional license-oriented SOA vendors effusively praise the Eclipse SOA initiative, as this could end up in a market cannibalization effect for the traditional license-oriented SOA vendors and their commercial platforms. At the EclipseCON we will have our first discussion with Eclipse members, and it is not surprising that we have already received greatest interest from SOA user companies. SOPERA is in contact with some major customers that are more than willing to back such an initiative.
Ricco Deutscher Strategy
Under the umbrella of the OSBF (Open Source Business Foundation), SOPERA, Microsoft, 1&1, Corisecio, and OpenXchange presented at the Cebit 2009, a path-breaking prototype of a heterogeneous application cloud based on an Internet Service Bus (see the OSBC press release). This announcement is a major milestone, and represents a new way in which business applications can be deployed through enterprises in an absolutely flexible and cost-efficient way.
Today, the application landscapes of enterprises are operated through dedicated data centers, but in the future, parts of it will be provided as a service from an internet cloud, from multiple providers. It will start with commodity services, such as, archiving and e-mailing, but will soon flash over core applications, such as, CRM. Enterprises that will not follow this trend will directly experience a competitive disadvantage, as their IT will quickly become too inflexible and expensive.
But also in such a scenario we face the fundamental integration question. Cloud computing has additional exigencies beyond the traditional application integration requirements. The fact that services can be obtained from different providers, makes service level monitoring indispensable. Furthermore, have the different platforms on which the services are being developed and operated (basically Java and .Net), to be absolutely transparent. Enterprises will use more than one provider for one, single service, and the provider selection will occur dynamically through the service levels required at that point of time. The Internet Service Bus - the Enterprise Service Bus of the application cloud – will have to meet all this requirements. SOPERA has proved at the Cebit 2009 that its prototyped fulfills already today core requirements of an Internet Service Bus, including
- A decentralized bus architecture that ensures scalability in the cloud,
- A native implementations in the predominant application platforms Java and .Net, and
- A dynamic, policy-driven, mediation between service-provider and service-consumer.
With it, SOPERA is at an excellent position for the future cloud computing market!
Ricco Deutscher Strategy