Levy: Don’t let SOA 360 make you dizzy

When BEA announced the new SOA 360 service-oriented architecture platform last month at the BEA World 2006 show in San Francisco, everyone agreed that it was big news. Dig deeper, though, and it is harder to agree on what, exactly, SOA 360 is: development tool or collaborative environment — or both? Rob Levy, executive vice president and CTO of BEA sat down at the show to chat with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill about the new platform.

Paul Krill: Would you explain the concepts of SOA 360 Workspace 360, Workspace Central, and Micro Services Architecture?

Rob Levy: Sure. Let’s start with the highest level, which is SOA 360. [If you] kind of think of SOA as a complete SOA lifecycle, SOA 360 is a governing approach to modeling, creating, developing, and deploying a lifecycle SOA application. It is a unifying methodology between all the product lines we have, as well as connecting it to other products.

PK: SOA products or all the products?

RL: Well, products that contribute to an SOA environment. It’s kind of hard to define what SOA products are. Think of it as a governing approach that is supported by a set of products, by a common architecture, and by … standards that govern the lifecycle. So if you drop from that, either to the bottom or the top, depending on how you want to look at that, on the bottom you’re going to need a common architecture that allows you to build those SOA applications across this lifecycle. Think of them as using the SOA practices to componentize our platform and our product line.

PK: So there’s Workspace 360 and Workspace Central — what’s the difference?

Workspace Central is central to Workspace 360. All of the four components of Workspace, for business analysts, for architects, for developers, for IT, will all store and read the artifacts from the same Workspace Central. So it’s kind of the hub.

PK: Does BEA think this simplifies things? Because it seems like pretty complex stuff.

RL: I’m not sure I agree. Again, I think the issue we always faced in the lifecycle is that each one of the pieces was done, but done in a separate manner. So businesspeople dealt with business issues with one set of tools, and architects dealt with another set of tools, and developers dealt with another. And what happened was, we believe that in order to make SOA simple, we have to put all of them in that cycle, and what connects that cycle is Workspace.

PK: In terms of BEA’s direction, obviously SOA is the big push for you?

RL: SOA is a huge push for us, as well as completely we agree with the statements made by Shaygan [Kheradpir, Verizon CIO] this morning. I think what we’re going to see is Web 2.0 fully into the enterprise and SOA pushing out into the consumer world. When that happens it’s going to be just like in the beginning age of the Internet, when in order to make the Internet successful, you really needed the technology and the infrastructure for this new world of sort of consumer-based development. You’re going to need an infrastructure that will allow you to push out the execution or the composition of the applications into this peer-to-peer world. And that’s where we’re going.

PK: Why do you say SOA in the consumer world?

RL: You look at SOA-based applications, they’re about composition. A good example this morning with Shaygan is people are looking to be able to compose the application at runtime, not at design time. What did he call it? At the “speed of need,” and I completely agree. We see the new wave of application development will be composed by need, not by creation from the beginning, from the hub and spoke. That will require a new type of infrastructure.

PK: How is BEA going to compete with the open source in the SOA field if people are trying to give stuff away? How do you compete with that?

RL: You don’t compete with it. You complement it. The architecture that we provide is open. So if you look at some of the functionality, if you picked up pieces from open source, or for that matter pick up pieces from our competitors, the infrastructure we offer is completely [optimal] to build on.