SOA Fundamentals - Now Available as a Book

I had requests from some of our certification students as to whether they could get the elearning materials in some other format they could study  and use offline. Though elearning aids understanding with animations and voice overs, there is no doubt that having a printed copy to hand also has other uses - such as for reference - as well as convenience and the familiarity of a tried and trusted format.

Consequently, our SOA Fundamentals eLearning materials are now available in printed book form.

SOA Fundamentals is not a pure technology book, but covers a wide range of topics including

• SOA Concepts and Principles
• Web Service Protocols
• SOA Technology Infrastructure
• Service Architecture
• Service Specification
• SOA Project Management
• SOA Governance
• SOA Adoption
• Business Architecture
• Business Value from SOA.

SOA Fundamentals is aimed at anyone who needs to understand the basics of SOA. That includes IT architects and developers, IT managers and IT specialists of all kinds, as well as business analysts and other business people working together with IT to deliver a service-based business.

As well as providing a basic understanding of SOA to any reader, this guide particularly supports students who are undertaking CBDI Forum certification in SOA Fundamentals as the certification questions are all based on the content of this guide.

Application Modernization Reports - Freely Available

We have recently made two of our recent reports on Application Modernization freely available.

These can be download from the website. See the Application Modernization Tab.

SAE2 - Supporting the Application Modernization Process

We start the new decade at CBDI Forum with a major focus on Application Modernization (AM). The need to reuse existing assets in new SOA solutions is not itself new, and we have covered this before in various reports, whilst the CBDI-SAE SOA Process has always included a ‘Legacy to Service Transition Planning’ discipline.

Equally, at Everware-CBDI, we have considerable practical experience in AM via a number of engagements our consultants have worked  on,  primarily in the CA Gen domain. We also recently announced the SOA4GEN  program along with partners Jumar Solutions.

However, we recognize that in many organizations AM has increased in priority, whilst SOA is becoming ‘business as usual’. That doesn’t mean AM is replacing SOA, rather it puts SOA in context. AM is the objective, and SOA is one of the key elements in achieving it.  Consequently, we wanted to increase our coverage of AM in our research and guidance, and further explore the relationship between AM and SOA.

One of my focuses in this work has been on the process. To date, our CBDI-SAE SO Process has been focused primarily on disciplines covering the planning and provisioning of the Service Portfolio, and its use in solution delivery.  To support AM, we have now begun to document additional disciplines such as Application Modernization Planning and Knowledge Discovery (understand the As-Is system, and extract knowledge of the current assets), and give them equal weight and depth of coverage to these in comparison with the existing  SO disciplines and detail how they interact.