Ron Schmelzer Quotations

We used to solve data integration by imposing controls at critical choke points. SOA eliminates these choke points, so I now have a data integration problem everywhere. That means every data access point has to be able to transform and manage data.

IBM is clearly showing that software alone won't solve the totality of SOA challenges, ... This will turn up the heat on the other platform vendors such as BEA (Systems) and Oracle to consider how they too will broaden their coverage of SOA beyond simply software and professional services.

I don't think people care as much about the profile as they care about the process of how they got to the profile. As a customer, I can make decisions based on what they're doing, and I can see the direction they're going in.

Faced with the prospects of competing with much-larger vendors, we believe that many will choose acquisition instead of trying to broaden their own capabilities or find deeper pockets. 2006 will bear out to be the year of super-consolidation for the SOA markets.

With IBM's entry into the network appliance space for SOA, we think this will turn up the heat on the other platform vendors such as BEA and Oracle to consider how they too will broaden their coverage of SOA beyond simply software and professional services.

Do you divvy it up, or do you provide a central service? SOA raises the fact that data is heterogeneous.

The whole portal approach to loading lots of stuff on back-end Web servers has grown stale in the tooth.

The way we think about interacting over the Web is changing. It only took one application to alter our entire expectation level.

There's always a context to data. Even when a field is blank, different applications impose different assumptions about what that means.

It's not so much sizzle now. There's more meat.

It's another indication of the market maturing. Clustered security is pretty advanced.

That's a bit less sexy, because you're getting down to brass tacks: implementation details, not the big news stories.

This is just continuing the momentum. We are past the stage where SOA is hype. It's the right time for SOA. Now it's a matter whether or not it will stick and whether companies will commit to it. Success stories like this help.

SOA is maturing. If you wanted to do SOA four years ago you were pretty much on your own. You had a couple of products that would let you do some Web services, but now SOA is a lot more than Web services. It's governance and security and metadata and much more.

All of these companies are piling into this real weird bandwagon. ESB is a problematic term that was sickly in 2005 and I think it's going to die in 2006.