Sunday, May 21, 2006

Oracle SOA Fabric

If you didn't have a chance to watch Thomas Kurian's keynote at JavaOne, I would encourage you to do so: it was far and away the most compelling and coherent keynote presentation this year. The three major focal areas were J2EE 1.5, SOA, and Web 2.0 support in our product line and in our donations to open source projects. Most of what Thomas talked about is functionality that is available now, so its a pretty exciting time to be here.

Of course, I am focused on the SOA products, so its nice to see the Fabric infrastructure get prominent billing. The really cool thing about Fabric is that its a best of breed combination of support for service infrastructure, policy management, business activity monitoring, identity based security and event driven architecture that is designed as a fully integrated, common platform: all the essential building blocks of the next generation IT infrastructure. There's not really any other platform offering that can compare. I have a good feeling its going to shortly be the standard SOA infrastructure for many enterprises.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Greg,

I have few questions about SOA Fabric. If you could shade light on them it would be really helpful for me to understand SOA better.

1. What exactly is SOA fabric?(Is it the same as they call a new product "services Fabric". IBM has Business Service Fabric, simillarly webmethods and Oracle has that.). I mean is SOA Fabric just a philosophy like SOA Architecture or product in market as mentioned above or both. What business problem does it solve which can not be solved by ESB.

2. Can BPM make an organization to move to SOA from scratch, that means if there is no ESB or EAI underlying tool then by purchasing BPM can an organization directly leap ahead on it's SOA way.

3. Essentially how can we compare SOA Fabric Vs ESB Vs BPM

With best regards

Greg Pavlik said...

Anon,

The SOA platforms (or "service fabrics") that are coming to market are really a convergence of ESB, BPM/BPEL, and other SOA related technologies on one integrated runtime environment, using one model to describe the composite services that are hosted on the platforms. For the most part, these platforms support multiple languages and technologies that are important for integration solutions. I have an article coming up in the Web Services Journal that describes these platforms in more detail. These platforms encompass both BPM and ESB technologies.

Can an organization move to SOA using a BPM tool and engine? Yes. Every solution is different, but this is certainly a reasonable path to take an evolutionary approach to developing composite services and new business processes.

Anonymous said...

Hi Greg,
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate that

Could you please elaborate more what SOA Fabric does more which ESB or for that matter BPM can not do. In other words why would client buy SOA Fabric if he can go SOA simply by buying BPM or ESB?

Could you please give any business case wherein we have to use SOA Fabric (or it would be better to use SOA Fabric) over ESB or BPM?

Thanking you in advance,

With best regards

Greg Pavlik said...

The "evolutionary" step here is a common model for hosting BPM, ESB, and other integration technologies on one platform. I'm guessing vendors will offer "BPM" or "ESB" solutions based on the shared common infrastructure as well as fully integrated SOA "suites".

Think of this as analogous to J2EE. Some folks only need to use servlets and can do without EJB. But it's generally the case that they come together in one package.

Sangita said...

Hi Greg,

I am just a beginne in SOA fabric and dont know much about it.

I just wanted a brief understanding of what is SOA Fabric and for what its mainly used.

I mean to say that for what this SOA Fabric has been designed.

Thanks
Sangita

Greg Pavlik said...

The "fabric" infrastructure that Thomas described is engineered in to our Oracle SOA infrastructure, which is a part of the 11g SOA Suite. It used internally within the software: end users work with SCA, BPEL, etc.