Interview with Jason Weisser: SOA is very difficult and important

In the interview, Mr. Jason Weisser, vice president of IBM software enterprise integrated solutions and one of the founding SOA experts, gave a detailed answer to some of the main questions about SoA.

SOA is not a product

Question: Tell me directly what SOA is?

Jason Weisser: Well, I will tell you what SOA is. SOA is not a "thing", a product, or a software suite that can be placed on a CD. You cannot pick up a CD engraved with SOA software and install it on the machine. Then the company entered the SOA era the next day. Recently I have heard that some companies have launched SOA products, which is ridiculous. Because SOA is not a product.

Question: Can soa be a technology?

Jason Weisser: SOA is a technology. However, it is not a general technology. It is a watershed technology. I have been working in the IT industry for more than 30 years. In the enterprise development field, SOA is the most important technological change I have seen over the past 30 years. I will take the SOA framework recently released by IBM as an example to explain the basic structure of SOA. With the support of this SOA framework, software system development starts from business process analysis and uses componentized business modeling to identify and analyze various business models, and integrate various best practices into it. On this basis, we establish a set of use cases, and use cases directly generate BPEL, which can be integrated into a service integration framework. There may be several Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in this framework. All services are provided through ESB, and even some management protocols are included, messages in XML format are also transmitted on this ESB. Legacy databases, CRM, and various existing systems are connected to the ESB. In this framework, there is a metadata library written in WSDL, which describes information about various services, so as to unify the modules on the ESB, A huge service repository is formed. All services directly related to business processes can be found in this service repository. All services are reusable for 100%. In fact, this service integration framework is the core of SOA and our current efforts. This service integration framework is a regulatory layer based on open standards. To operate anything in SOA, it must comply with a series of rules. Obviously, such a framework cannot be a product. It is a technology, a methodology, or even a business guiding ideology. I mean, in addition to SOA as a technology, the large-scale application of this IT architecture will inevitably require the enterprise's business operations to be adjusted accordingly. There is no doubt that such adjustments will greatly improve the business level of enterprises.

Question: Many people understand that SOA only exposes past services through new standards and methods. Isn't this true?

Jason Weisser: Obviously not comprehensive. SOA is an architecture. If it is just a service interface specification, where is the architecture?

SOA, IBM is serious

Question: What is IBM's attitude towards SOA?

Jason Weisser: We attach great importance to SOA. IBM has been focusing on service orientation since six years ago. I joined IBM three years ago and then focused on how to describe the business at the workflow level and make the description executable. At that time, IBM had just acquired a company that had accumulated profound service orientation, and our software products became increasingly mature. My team is a new type of organization within IBM. We help customers build solutions based on SOA and face various complex problems with customers. We have established four centers, the first of which is Beijing. Over the past few years, we have cooperated with more than 200 large companies distributed in various business fields and gained practical experience in SOA. Two weeks ago, Gartner reported that IBM was the first in the SOA field.

Question: However, other companies also claim to support SOA and release the SOA platform.

Jason Weisser: Let me tell you one thing. SOA is difficult and complex, beyond the control of general technology companies. If you see a company that hasn't mentioned SOA for the past three years, and its senior technical staff are constantly being tapped out by new enterprises like Google, then a SOA platform is suddenly launched within a week, so please keep yourself highly skeptical. In the past few years, IBM has invested $1 billion in the SOA field, and has been cooperating with a large number of customers to achieve today's achievements. However, IBM has never released any SOA product or ESB product, because there is no such thing at all. IBM is real. We just released an SOA framework in May. In the past one or two years. we work closely with small companies, such as Ford Motor, Daimler-Chrysler, and New York bank. We have proven our technology and capabilities, other companies need to prove themselves.

Question: What about Microsoft?

Jason Weisser: If you understand what I just explained to SOA. as you know, SOA is very complicated. This technology needs to deal with a large amount of technical details, how to make a component described in bepl work correctly, and it is secure, manageable, efficient, and transparent, this is very difficult. Yes, Microsoft does have the ability to do this, but Microsoft is not here. Microsoft has always put consumer products oriented to the public at the top. SOA for enterprise integration is not the arena of Microsoft. I used to be the chief enterprise architect at Microsoft, but I found that Microsoft thinks that the whole world is single. The server is running Windows and the client is running Windows. Unfortunately, this is not in line with the real world. This is why I left Microsoft.

China should directly enter the SOA Era

Question: It seems that SOA is difficult and mainly used to integrate existing systems. However, China now needs to develop more new systems. Does it mean that SOA is not suitable for China?

Jason Weisser: My 18-generation ancestor lives in a grass house. Do I have to live in a grass house? Chinese enterprises have a good opportunity to build their own IT infrastructure on an advanced architecture such as SOA. Why should we repeat the old path we have taken? In fact, I think Chinese enterprises have many characteristics that are suitable for SOA. For example, your business changes a lot and the relevance is relatively high. If the traditional component-based development method is used, the development difficulty and reusability are not ideal. When it comes to reusability, I don't mean that the component is not reusable, but that the level of reuse is not high enough. Enterprises want to reuse services, which cannot be achieved through componentization. In the past, the IT industry has been providing solutions for enterprises based on their own capabilities. Most of the time, the business department told the IT department that we needed such a thing, but the IT department directly replied that we couldn't do it. When developing applications, developers are not led by the business department, but by the Technical Department. This is a shame for the IT industry. I think the situation in China is similar. SOA is an opportunity to change all of this. After SOA is mature, technicians can more effectively meet the new and changed requirements put forward by business departments. I will tell you the fact that in the United States, a whole generation of developers have gone through enterprise development for a long time, experienced many failures and setbacks, and accumulated a lot of experience, if Chinese developers want to follow this path, do you know what it means? This means that you will be far behind. If you want to create a system like SAP, may you surpass the Germans? Is it possible to surpass Indians? In addition, once SOA becomes the mainstream, it means that the system you make with the traditional method is "legacy system ". If you boldly move towards SOA and enter the SOA era, the entire situation will be reversed and you will be ahead of the world!