Much has been made about the purchase of Webify by IBM a few days ago, and for good reason. This is the first time that a large company has put it’s money where it’s SOA mouth has been all this time. Despite the enthusiasm such a purchase as created among the SOA community (especially smaller groups specializing in vertical markets such as Insurance), the bigger point this purchase makes is that despite all the marketing blitz and betting of the Enterprise Software market on SOA by large players, it’s the small players who seem to be doing it right. IBM, for it’s sake, has so far failed in it’s SOA products for specific industries, and it’s purchase of Webify demonstrates their weakness in developing their own custom SOA solutions.
Sadly, I have been in the position to experience this failure first hand.
I am currently neck deep in an Insurance SOA experiment with IBM as we speak, structured primarily around WPS (Websphere Process Server), SDO (Service Data Objects), Websphere Integration Developer IDE and all the rules engines you can imagine. In the SOA future, no matter what the business, business rules (BPEL) that drive the business processes in our environment will be the most important aspect of the Service Oriented Architecture. It is these mediation flows consuming and transforming messages on the ESB that give a large enterprise the flexibility that SOA promises in rapidly exposing and using services to respond to business needs. For an industry such as Insurance, the business rules and services are some of the most complex and highly regulated in the business world. In IBM’s SOA view, Websphere Process Server is the engine that combines Connectors, transformations of ESB messages and mediation flows all in one package. At least, that was the plan.
We were one of the first to attempt to use WPS in partnership with IBM, and we came in to the experiment with great enthusiasm. After all, insurance is a field ripe for taking control of complex business rules. However, some attempts we have made to stretch or conform WPS to our liking has met with failure on IBM’s side. This includes the following issues:
- Consuming SOAP with attachments to convert a message to a ESB compatible Business Object or SDO is not possible
- Consuming webservice messages not HTTP or other standard form is tedious
- Numerous .xx releases to WPS and its development environment, Rational Integration Developer, has been IBM’s usual reply to issues with service connectors and visual mapping of services to Business Objects*.
This isn’t to say IBM’s suite of products in the SOA space isn’t impressive. Their Integration Developer IDE, built on top of Eclipse in much the same way Rational Software Architect and Rational Application Developer are (indeed, it’s just a few extra plug-ins), is amazing in it’s ability to attempt to consume external webservices and transform them in to SDOs that are controlled through the use of BEPL through-out the synapse. The problem is that the technology isn’t quite working yet, something that is disappointing when SOA has already made such inroads in the marketplace.
To this point, we are scaling back our strategy of using WPS in our new SOA architecture until the product matures, a very sad real world lesson to the marketing websites and seminars IBM is currently pitching. Keep in mind we’ve not stepped outside of IBM’s technology ecosystem once so far, including using every single piece of Websphere branded application server and Component we can license.
Although I developed the architecture of the SOA migration, including an inventive strategy to wrap existing non-SOA capable services to create custom SDOs for our ESB (some of which is hinted at when I published my SDO pattern for Rational Software Architect), the primary pain has been experienced by our Integration Team who are trying to get Websphere Process Server and it’s various services to work according to our designs. It is here, in the constant PMRs with IBM in nose-bleed level support tiers, that we are getting the most reality.
Insurance, as I stated, is a tricky business to begin with, and IBM was right in realizing that when it came to this vertical market, it needed someone who knew what it was doing. However, given my experience with IBM’s SOA products to date, they are going to need much more help than Webify can provide.
* - “Business Objects” is IBM’s term for SDOs generated from messages in WPS. It does not conform to the idea of “Business Objects” from an architecture stand-point. At this point, we should probably rename BOs from Fowler’s viewpoint since it is widely mis-used.
