David Linthicum

The notion of building bridges to service providers and managing the interaction will become more commonplace in 2006 as we learn to accept that many services we leverage within an enterprise are services we may not host. The technology exists today. We need to define and refine our approaches now, including architectures, enabling technology, and use of standards. Most enterprises are way behind. We are moving toward a day when most of our enterprise applications may be delivered as services, and thus provide a more economical way to approach information technology management with businesses going forward. This is also the great equalizer since businesses, both large and small, will have access to the same number and quality of services, much as they do with Web sites today. Shared services will create many opportunities, including better agility and the ability t... (more)

Semantic Mapping, Ontologies, and XML Standards

When dealing with application integration, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable. In contrast to abstraction, generalization ignores many of the details and ends up with general ideas. Therefore, when generalizing, we start with a collection of types and analyze commonalities to generalize them. Clearly, semantic heterogeneity and divergence hinders the notion of generalization, and as commonalities of two entities are r... (more)

Why 'Enterprise Architects' Are Ineffective with SOA

Architectures are like archaeology; in essence, layers upon layers of systems, applications, databases, and connections, typically built or procured to solve a tactical problem. Many corporations talk a good game and brag about the strategic long-term direction of the enterprise architecture that serves the business. The fact is, tactical needs have trumped strategic direction over the years. Thus, layers upon layers of technology on top of technology are the end result, and an architecture that is inflexible, static, fragile, and thus difficult to change along with the business... (more)

Building Private Clouds

While the hype rages around cloud computing, most cloud implementations go the way of the private cloud and avoid the public clouds for now.  Private clouds are exactly what they sound like.  Your own instance of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS that exists in your own data center, all tucked away, protected and cozy.  You own the hardware, you can hug your server. However, what defines a private cloud these days could also mean systems that are remotely hosted but dedicated to a single enterprise, and, in some cases, provided out of a public cloud data center as a virtual private cloud.  Thus... (more)

SOA - Loosely Coupled...What?

With the advent of Web services and SOA, we've been seeking to create architectures and systems that are more loosely coupled. Loosely coupled systems provide many advantages including support for late or dynamically binding to other components while running, and can mediate the difference in the component's structure, security model, protocols, and semantics, thus abstracting volatility. This is in contrast to compile-time or runtime binding, which requires that you bind the components at compile time or runtime (synchronous calls), respectively, and also requires that changes ... (more)