How's your T-Zone? – IBM Impact

[IBM’s SOA is] not [just] going back to the old, it’s taking what we learned in the old and taking it back to the new. –Robert LeBlanc

This afternoon, IBM (of course) re-enforced and nuanced out it’s message about SOA’ness from this morning: SOA is the technology to build out what business’s want and IBM is the most mature, thus, best choice for your SOA-buddy. This question is critical to IBM because it want so to sell to The Business, not The Tech People. Simply getting the job done isn’t enough for IBM’s SOA marketing: it has to justify itself to The Business.

Never mind the technology, let’s get down to Business

The exact technologies used here – the answer to “what is an SOA” to most tech people out there – where sort of irrelevant. If anything, ESBs came up the most. Web Services were rarely used, and MQ was a popular one too.

The interesting angle there is that I’m sitting up in the “Tech Zone,” and some folks at a high-table are going on about REST, how IBM people talk about it, how it’s cheaper than [whatever else], and, “hey, why wouldn’t I want that?”

What’s Missing?

Simplicity and low cost were definitely two things missing from the talk today. I keep using it as a foil – but, what the hell? Foil, ho! – that was the main thrust of every talk at MuleCon last week. And the phrase “open source”? Not really to be found.

Simplicity doesn’t have immediately obvious ROI, but low cost is pretty straight forward there.

Indeed, during the last break-out session on selling the value of ROI, one quick-witted analyst had a nice snark. The IBM folks were saying how they go into a customer and match pre-existing, already figured out “solutions” to customer projects. Stuff like, “we’ve got 60% of your project figured out ’cause we’ve already done 5 such installs.” To which, as the analyst asked, you’d expect the Amdahl muggers out there to state, “well, I guess that means we outta get a 60% discount.”

Scale

The story of scale works, though, if you’re the only one who can credibly talk about it. In the usual Twitter storm of “what’s SOA mean?” that usually follows a few drops of “SOA,” several people rightly pointed out that it’s just some technology to get what the business wants. As one person put it:

The business wants stuff – they put up a business case. SOA is one way of delivering that stuff, not the ‘stuff’ itself.

If the delivery mechanism gets the business it’s stuff, then it’s all where do I sign?

During a customer panel, Jim Ofalt from The Pep Boys drew this out well. Using my words, not his carefully, positively phrased ones: once a chunk of enterprise infrastructure works, you don’t really get the (easy) chance to change. They haven’t looked at their cash register (PoS) system in two years. Good luck getting business buy off to change it if the stuff just works. As Ofalt put it: “it’s an opportunity that we look forward to everyday.”

Selling SOA

This is the kind of technology adoption mind-set (or lack thereof) that bends to only two silver-tounges:

1. We can do it for less, and make more money for The Business.
2. What we have now doesn’t work, we have to change it, maybe even at any cost.

It’s not like selling iPods: people won’t do it because it’s cool, or even a good idea.

Selling SOA as better used to be done with re-use. Once we rig-up this SOA stuff, we’ll be able to save money by re-using it. Analysts vigorously poked at IBM folks on that idea today, no doubt trying to get them to admit to the contemporary folk-lore that SOA re-use is a myth. While IBM folks didn’t admit to such, aside from the snarky exchange above, they didn’t really mention re-use as a big deal.

When asked, the customer panel stated that saving money is the primary justification for SOA. There are some benefits from forcing a shared model between different businesses, but it all came down to money. As Bob Bachmann, from Aetna said, “when we save money they take notice.”

Nick Hortovanyi had another good reason for using SOA, having nothing to do with The Business, but still completely valid. It’s to “modernize” the infrastructure. What’s that mean though? See here:

re:modernization – skill sets for staff retention (who wants to program in COBOL) and Business Processes to compete in a global market.

While “cool” may not sell to the check-writers, it sure works for your tech-people.

Still, we haven’t heard a lot about the second option: getting an SOA was what we had to do. It was the only way to solve the problem.

Disclaimer: IBM is a client and paid T&E. MuleSource is a client as well.

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