Gartner recently released a report where they examine and evaluate the ability of leading application infrastructure providers/vendors to provide organizations with complete end-to-end support for for Systematic SOA-Style applications and projects.
New and composite service-oriented business applications require a complex collection of capabilities in runtime technologies and development tools. We examine the ability of leading application infrastructure vendors to provide users with complete end-to-end support for SOA-style application projects.
The report recognizes that many organizations looking for infrastructure solutions are looking for an integrated suite with one vendor that can serve as the point of contact. The report goes on the define the assumptions and considerations that the report aims to cover.
Systematic projects include long-term consideration and project planning in the process of design and technology selection for the application. They target applications that are intended for extended periods of use, carry advanced service-level requirements and typically have an impact on the overall information context of the business organization. These are distinct from opportunistic projects that are undertaken in response to urgent demands and target applications of limited lifetime, responsibility and complexity. These projects value time to market and cost optimization above the long-term use and flexibility of the application. This Magic Quadrant focuses only on the systematic project types…
The report evaluates vendor's portfolio of application infrastructure offerings fulfills the requirements for systematic projects.
The evaluation of a particular vendor is based on the premise that the vendor is the sole provider of the complete end-to-end set of requirements for this project type.
The report also defers to other available analysis that are related but not really covered in this particular report
Gartner also offers a separate analysis of the strategic SOA infrastructure projects, where the market is focused on establishing the operational and governance environments for coexistence and interoperation of multiple SOA-style applications. […] If your project looks to build a systematic SOA application and, in the process, establish the governance and operational platform for the future SOA-style application projects and acquisitions, we recommend that you examine the "Magic Quadrant for Shared SOA Interoperability Infrastructure Projects" together with the vendor assessments presented in this research.
Gartner also offers analysis of systematic application integration projects. This type of project focuses on the integration of pre-existing software that is resident in a variety of different systems, custom-designed, purchased, contracted as a cloud service or offered by partner enterprises. There is no focus on the ability to construct new applications. There is also no priority for SOA-style integration at the expense of other integration practices. If your project, while building a new SOA application, must substantially interact with non-SOA external resources, then we recommend that you examine the application integration Magic Quadrant, along with this research, to fine-tune your decision process.
The report reflects the emmergence of cloud technology providers; "as IT organizations evaluate enabling technology for their projects, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) options compete with traditional on-premises alternatives". The report can be summed up by the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA-Style Application Projects
Source: Gartner (October 2010)
The key technical characteristics that are essential to such offering portfolios are:
Competitive technology of a back-end application execution container(s), including support for SOA-style modularity, accessible from like and unlike clients; capable of supporting advanced quality-of-service requirements, but also suitable for modest-scale projects; worthy of the requirements of systematic project efforts.
Competitive technologies of front-end execution container(s), including support for SOA-style external resources, accessing like and unlike services; worthy of the requirements of systematic project efforts.
Development and runtime modeling, design, maintenance and management tools required to establish and manage one complete SOA-style application.
Development and runtime capabilities for service orchestration, with access to like and unlike, local and remote service interfaces.
Governance of SOA resources, though limited here to just the one application context.
The vendors were evaluated in terms of ability to execute and completeness of vision and one of the important criteria in the evaluation is the ability for the vendors to be capable of delivering as a sole vendor for these kinds of initiatives.
There must be evidence of production success (present or imminent) by this vendor as a sole provider of technology for this project type.
Be sure to check out the report and add you opinions on the findings of this report.