ebizQ reported yesterday that IBM has announced a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) center dedicated to assisting U.S. Federal agencies in adopting and benefiting from SOA Inforamtion Technology (IT) initiatives.  The IBM Federal SOA Institute has three manadates that is will focus on:

• innovation
• solution development
• education

In a statement recevied by ebizQ Anne K. Altman, Managing Director of IBM’s U.S. Federal business stated “We believe this first-of-a-kind center will help Federal agencies identify new ways to build and utilize IT systems, quickly improve and reuse legacy systems, and reduce overall application development, operations and management.”

The statement also detailed some of the inner workings of the new Federal SOA Inisitute.

“The IBM Federal SOA Institute includes dedicated technology and consulting resources to support Federal organizations, and those serving this specialized community. A key goal of the institute will be to spur innovation by cultivating collaboration among IBM researchers, universities, and Federal agencies. In the institute’s working lab, SOA methodologies and technologies are being designed, tested and demonstrated specifically for Federal environments. The lab is also assisting with customer-related pilots, and serving as a central location to collect reusable technology assets and best practices that can accelerate customer acceptance. As part of the educational mission, the institute has launched a speaker series for senior level customers and technology partners on topics such as SOA Governance, Service Oriented Modeling, Security, and Reuse of Legacy Assets in an SOA. In the future, practitioner level briefings will be organized to exchange ideas from both the public and private sector.”

The IBM Federal SOA Institute is part of a long term commitment by IBM to the Federal community, which includes significant investments in software, hardware, research and services. IBM has more than 80 distinguished engineers and architects dedicated to helping solve the unique IT challenges of federal government agencies In addition to the institute, IBM has two Federally focused Competency Centers in the Washington, DC region that offer organizations the opportunity to learn and test new IBM and Federal Systems Integrator (FSI) capabilities that large and small organizations can use to address Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Collaboration, and Supply Chain requirements.

An announcement was made during IBM’s Federal SOA Executive Summit in Washington, DC

So what does this mean to companies like Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin?  IMNHO, this should raise some eyebrows of those types of organizations.  For years these traditional federal contractors have kinda had the corner on that marketspace and have relied upon vendors such as IBM to provide the hardware and software necessary.  With the opening of this Federal SOA Institute, IBM seems to be saying “yeah we can provide you with the hardware and software, but oh by the way we undestand SOA and  have centers solely dedicated to helping you solve your problems utilzing SOA.”  Seems like traditional federal contractors and system integrators might have some bew competition.

Most people have heard of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).  They’re the ones that brought us the original WS-I profiles, the WS-I Basic Profile, and the SOAP Profile and the Attachments Profile which provided information on how to use SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, and UDDI 2.0, and the SOAP with attachments specifications.

Well now they have released a new profile that marries SOAP security with interoperability, the WS-I Basic Security Profile (BSP) 1.0.  The BSP eeks to add the missing link of interoperability for Web services developers using the OASIS WS-Security standard and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology.  With the BSP people can make sure they’re designing shareable, interoperable Web services that can interface securely. One of the strengths of the profile is that it covers interoperability for WS-Security and SSL.  This will go along way to help ensure secure interoperability once vendors begin supporting it.

I recently came across are presentation given by Lockheed Martin IS&GS’s own Melvin Greer discussing modeling an SOA through its reusable of service components.  This is a pretty good discussion on the value and impact of reusable service components.  If you are interested check out Melvin’s Brainstorm SOA Conference presentation “Service Oriented Architecture Modeling Via Reuse of Service Components” and the corresponding audio.

Many organizatione struggle on the cost estimation of their SOA activities.  To often they underestimate considerably.  So, how do you calculate the cost of an SOA?  In a recent artcile Dave Linthicum provided some general guidlelines for doing just that. SOA = (Data Complexity cost + Service Complexity cost+ Process Complexity cost + Enabling Technology cost)

Data Complexity cost = (((Number of Data Elements) * Complexity of the Data Storage Technology) * Labor Units))

• Number of Data Elements being the number of semantics you’re tracking in your domain, new or derived.
• Complexity of the Data Storage Technology, expressed as a percentage between 0 and 1 (0% to 100%). For instance, Relational is a .3, Object-Oriented is a .6, and ISAM is a .8.

So, at $100 a labor unit, or the amount of money it takes to understand and refine one data element, we could have:

Cost of Data Complexity = (((3,000) * .8) * $100)

Cost of Data Complexity = $150,000 USD, the amount of money needed to both understand and refine the data so it fits into your SOA

Once you understand this Dave says apply the same notions to:

• Service Complexity cost

• Process Complexity cost

• Enabling Technology cost

For more information read Dave’s artcile "How Much Will Your SOA Cost?"

SOA development services have become a hot topic in recent months with the establishment of SOA development centers in several countries, India and China primarily, by several large organizations.  The latest to announce center openings is Accenture.  Accenture has established a center in India in order to build applications based on SOA principles using Sun Microsystems technologies.

The Accenture center is focused on developing composite applications that bring identity and access management into the SOA paradigm.  These reusable assets are targeting markets such as government and telecommunications.  Accenture, like many other large organizations, is off-shoring to places like India to take advantage of the lower costs.

The center will utilize the Identity Management Suite, Java Composite Application Platform Suite, and Solaris OS technologies from Sun Microsystems.  Sun is also providing some staff to the center.

This is a similar move the IBM did when they established SOA centers in Beijing and Pune ,India.  The IBM centers develop SOA based applications that can be reused by various customers.

There is a need to look at what it costs companies to operate within the U.S. compared to other countries and restructure things to make it more inviting or this off-shoring trend will only continue and grow.  The overhead required in the U.S., from legal, facilities, insurance and employee benefits, compounded with labor rates and cost of living is why many companies look to other countries.  Now with everyone under the sun being able to develop service components the competition is going to be fierce.  This is especially true for large system integrators(LSI’s) because they are going to see competitors like never before.  These new competitors are going to employ new business models and lightweight process frameworks which will cause LSI’s to rethink their rates and business model or they will be by-passed.