Practice What You Preach

Here at BEA we tend to spit out a lot of marketing literature about SOA, which makes sense, since that is one of our main product focuses. The truth is (sorry, marketing folks), I don't read most of that literature. I am sure there is a place for it, but if I want to know what a product stack is really about, I need to see it in action (and not just in a glitzy sales demo).

Normally, I don't take a non-technical focus with this blog, since there are plenty of other people (who are smarter than me) who can give you excellent content about product management, enterprise development planning, or any number of other 'soft' skills. I did, however, get a chance to play with an application we call Ensemble at a recent all-hands meeting, and I wanted to share my impressions...

Create Your Own Portal  The simple fact is, the 'mash up' capability of the product is what gets me excited the most. We already embed a tagging framework in the ALUI portal, but if it's extended to provide any piece of an application in a standard HTML document, the buzzword mashup might actually mean something.

Watch out... we're actually using SOA. The reason this post is titled Practice What You Preach is that we're actually using SOA in our own products. Ensemble is really a collection of enterprise services (a configuration service, a security service, a content proxy, an admin service), rather than one giant application. This lets you better manage each piece of the product, and I have a hunch, will eventually build to an overall integration across the product stack, plus a set of web-based API's you can use for customization.

Perimeter Security: It's cool, but why is it the first thing mentioned?  Some of our literature positions Ensemble as a 'perimeter security' product, which is true to a certain extent, but, in my opinion, off the mark when it comes to the true power of the application. Getting excited about SSO is like getting excited about dishwashing detergent. There are plenty of varieties out there and most of them work just fine.

What's the endgame? If it were up to me, the tagging and security framework would eventually replace the ALUI portal entirely. The ALUI portal you see now would become a set of standard widgets and HTML pages with custom markup that are fully modifiable. I'm not sure if this really is the plan, but if I were thinking about the future of the portal and the enterprise market, I'd be considering it.

Just to show you I haven't been replaced by someone from our marketing department, I'll leave you with some lingering doubts:

• Many enterprise applications are still custom built, and are certainly not expecting to end up as embedded tags in someone else's HTML artwork. There will be plenty of headaches when fantasy meets reality.
• Will the performance of a SOA based product stack up to a homogenous environment? If there are HTTP calls on the back end for security plus every piece of a page, what guarantee do we have that our rendering times are going to be acceptable to our front end users?
• How will this all fit together without replicating functionality other vendors are already providing (or even doing better than us)? One differentiation we have had from the market in general is our less technical approach to the portal. Sure, you can customize, but you can also run it out of the box. The last thing we want is to lose our business users by letting programmers run the show.
• Will SOA be more of a headache than a problem solver? How many services do we need to make the product stack flexible without making it overly complicated?

Anyway, the Ensemble product team deserves a lot of kudos for their efforts thus far. We're only at 1.0 and I'm already excited. (I promise to write something obscure and technical in my next post)