David Besemer

The original inspiration for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was vendor neutrality and interoperability among best-of-breed technology components, comprising a cohesive system that is flexible and adaptable enough to meet ever-changing enterprise demands. Yet, recent news from well-regarded SOA technology vendors might lead one to believe SOA is heading in the opposite direction, toward a multi-faceted yet proprietary solution from a single source provider. What should enterprises consider as they plan SOAs, or do if their SOA implementations are already underway? This article reviews the best-of-breed versus proprietary approaches, and draws conclusions based on the original intentions for SOA. SOA is used to provide standardized interfaces between enterprise systems so that one application can easily utilize the services (data or process logic) of another. SO... (more)

Data Services: Bridging the SOA and Metadata Management Gap

In today's difficult economic times, maximizing return on assets is a strategic imperative. Information assets are no exception. Service-oriented architecture (SOA), with its focus on agility and reuse, plays a critical role by accelerating development of new high-business-value applications from existing information assets. However, before new SOA applications can unleash the business value of these information assets, enterprises must first gain an understanding of and control over the assets they have. This fundamental truth is the basis of today's metadata management initiat... (more)

A Maturity Model for Measuring Data Virtualization Platforms

Data virtualization has become a hot topic as enterprises and government agencies add this maturing technology to their data integration toolkits in pursuit of greater IT agility and lower costs. Rising key performance indicators (KPIs) for both demand and supply clearly tell this story.  With demand exploding fivefold[1], and ETL, ESB and BI vendors extending their existing data integration offerings and bringing new data virtualization wares to market, enterprises and government agencies are seeking a way to measure and compare the data virtualization platform offerings availa... (more)