cognito ergo sum?

Unfortunately, 'I blog, therefore I am' seems to have greater resonance these days.

So, dragged kicking and screaming by my Paremus colleagues, I've agreed to start, what feels to be the somewhat unnatural behavior, that of 'blogging'.

The Usual Disclaimer:

Being the founder and CEO for a enterprise software company based in the UK (yes - I did say the UK!), my views hopefully influence my colleagues, and company direction ;) That said, my views are my own, and do not formally represent those of my colleagues and company.

In summary, my career initially started as an Astrophysicist, but a family and mortgage finally convinced me that I need to earn a living, and so I became an economic migrant, moving into an IT career with a major Investment Bank with offices based in London. After 7 very interesting years, I made the difficult decision to leave the Bank, and set-up Paremus in 2001.

"Great timing!", I hear from those of you whom started ventures around the same time ;)

I've always been more interested in the underlying principles, concepts and fundamental "truths", rather than the specifics of a system implementation. With the creation of Paremus, I found these interests translated into a deep curiosity concerning Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), Recovery Oriented Computing ROC and how these concepts might finally address some of the fundamental issues faced by modern distributed enterprise systems.

Whilst these interests have ongoing influence in our internal research and product development programs, they were also a key driver for the formation of the codeCauldron community. The Cauldron community, founded by Paremus in 2006, has the simple intention of fostering the development of next generation of distributed autonomic system. For our part, Paremus engineers, have successfully leverage some of the CAS / RoC design principles to which I refer to create Newton; a distributed OSGi / Jini / SCA based service framework, again hosted by the codeCauldron open-source community.

So, if you find my subsequent ramblings of interest, you may find a visit to Cauldron worthwhile.

A not so recent report on end-user adoption of SOA by Saugatuck Technology makes interesting reading; especially if one shares my misgivings about the Industries' ongoing Web Services mantra.

I found the following extracts particulary enlightening:

"... it became clear that many ( early SOA adopters) are merely managing a collection of Web services, and have yet to make a strong commitment to SOA as a management discipline — as opposed to an integration technology."

additional;

"... ironically whilst 57% of end users cited cost reduction as the primary driver for the adoption of SOA, no evidence was found for short-term operational cost savings, though longer term cost savings were expected".

and finally

"only 23% of adopters expected to increase business agility from their SOA any time soon."

So wrapping an existing business service to create a Web Service has no immediate effect on either operational costs or system agility?

Well, I'll be damned!

But why the suprise?

In reality, the Web Services revolution had little to do with making enterprise business systems more agile or robust. Rather Web Services enable existing monolithic, and operationally brittle and expensive services, to be delivered through corporate firewall infrastructure. This allowing for the potential of service outsourcing or the use of alternative White Labled or ASP type services; these service delivery models of great interest to the giants in the IT industry.

Hence, for those that rely on a "wrap it, and make it a Web Service" - cost reduction, resilience and agility benefits will most like remain elusive/unobtainable goals.

To achieve these objectives, one needs to radically re-think one's approach to enterprise IT ;)