Distributed SOA

Last week I attended the Forrester Enterprise Architect forum and heard a pretty consistent cry from people walking around and stopping at the booth; "How do I implement SOA in a distributed environment?"   This question is being raised by people talking about 3 or 4 locations distributed worldwide to 500 locations in the US.  Most of the people have evaluated the competition and realize their service orchestration engines are great in a hub and spoke model but do not really support global processing.  More to the point, even if they supported the idea of distributed applications, they do not support the idea of management/control of that environment, i.e. I can deploy the application to a remote location for version 1 of the solution, but version 2 will require me to re-deploy a whole new application.  Worse than this, there is management overhead that I must place in the remote location, e.g. someone to start/stop and monitor the application server or similar.

Well now I can see these problems are solved and have been for a number of years with Progress Sonic ESB.  The enterprise service bus (ESB) provides the ability to not only distribute the service/event processing to where it makes sense - e.g. if I am a retailer and need to allow my in store POS devices to communicate - but at the same time allows them to communicate through firewalls with the various applications distributed in other stores and the corporate headquarters.

This whole SOA deployment can be managed from a central location to ensure that no IT resources are required within the distributed locations - other than to turn the hardware on/off occasionally.  Metrics and Notifications are fed up to existing management software, and I can view log files of remote applications from the central console.  Also, new versions of the services can be deployed centrally so updates can be deployed to 500+ sites at the speed of the network, and if the network is down, the ESB will hold the request until the network returns.

SOA What? If you have a distributed SOA/event-based requirement, look no further than Progress Sonic ESB. OK, so as a principle architect, I'm probably not supposed to be "marketing" on this blog, but not only will Sonic ESB allow you to create your application with minimal code in a distributed environment, but you will also be able to manage it, and reduce the time and cost it takes to make your SOA a success.