Jason Bloomberg

For several years now, ZapThink has spoken about SOA Governance "in the narrow" vs. SOA governance "in the broad." SOA governance in the narrow refers to governance of the SOA initiative, and focuses primarily on the Service lifecycle. When vendors try to sell you SOA governance ... (more)

ZapThink revels in stirring up controversy almost as much as we enjoy clarifying subtle concepts that give architects that rare "aha!" moment as they finally discern the solution to a particularly knotty design problem. Last month's Process Isomorphism ZapFlash, therefore, gave u... (more)

ZapThink has long championed the close relationship between Business Process Management (BPM) projects and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives. As anyone who has been through our Licensed ZapThink Architect Bootcamp can attest, we have a process-centric view of SOA, w... (more)

ZapThink's integration cost curve, which we published back in 2002, continues to stir discussion amongst our Licensed ZapThink Architects. In brief, our argument is that while traditional middleware-based integration leads to unpredictable spikes in cost when business requirement... (more)

As students go through our Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) course, they experience a series of "aha" moments, as we systematically tear down their preconceptions about what Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is -- and what it is not. But perhaps the biggest aha moment of all, ... (more)

In one of ZapThink's recent Licensed ZapThink Architect courses for a US Department of Defense (DoD) contractor, we were discussing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Quality. I pointed out that as a SOA implementation matures, it becomes increasingly important to manage quality... (more)

ZapThink recently conducted our Licensed ZapThink Architect Bootcamp course for a branch of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). As it happens, an increasing proportion of our US-based business is for the DoD, which is perfectly logical, given the strategic nature Servi... (more)

Quick! What does a Service look like? Is it an icon on the screen or some collection of XML? Or maybe the concept of Service is too abstract to have a visual representation at all? This question may sound superficial, but in fact, goes to the heart of how Service-Oriented Archite... (more)

Now that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is finally becoming mainstream, an increasing number of people are asking us what comes after SOA. If SOA is one step in the evolution of distributed computing, the reasoning goes, then something is bound to be next in line. Furthermor... (more)

So, you've been following ZapThink long enough to know that beginning a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) project by purchasing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is starting at the wrong end of the initiative. Purchasing any technology, especially an ESB, at the beginning of an a... (more)

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) presents a challenge to software marketing people like none other in recent history. On the one hand, SOA has been the top enterprise software bandwagon to jump on for the last four years or so, but on the other hand, many vendors have struggle... (more)

It sounds so obvious when you get right down to it: you need to know what problem you're solving before you can solve it. Common sense tells you to start with the problem before you can find the solution to the problem. If you start with a solution without knowing what the proble... (more)

It may come as a surprise to our long-term readers that even after seven years of talking about Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), ZapThink still has something novel and interesting to say about what a Service truly is. But in fact, although we define the term ... (more)

As we predicted earlier in the year, Cloud computing is starting to take hold, especially if you believe the marketing literature of vendors and consulting firms. Yet, we are seeing an increasing number of Cloud success stories, ranging from simplistic consumption of utility Serv... (more)

At the Integration Consortium's recent Global Integration Summit, I sat next to a fellow at lunch who had been in the integration business his entire career. He began his career hand-coding integrations to IBM mainframes, and over the next twenty years, had connected one system t... (more)

These days nearly every sizable organization has either implemented some form of SOA or has it on their roadmap. They quickly find that SOA efforts tend to expand like spider webs, eventually touching every corner of IT as well as the business itself. Due to the vital role that d... (more)