Update from Web Services on Wall Street Show

Wow, things have really changed. I remember the first WS on Wall Street show I was at in '03 (if memory serves). It was all about "web service proxies." It was hard to tell the differentiation between the vendors, and, 90% of those vendors are gone from the market now.

Why the reminiscing? Well, aside from the usual suspects at the show today (Software AG, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Progress), it seemed that the bulk of the other vendors were "mashup" vendors. And, if you looked at their signage (and listened to their messaging) it was all the same - tag, share, and collaborate on content/services.

SOA What? Well, what are mashup vendors doing at an SOA show?

Well, web services in particular have made application integration quite easy. Sure, there are issues but nothing like the integration issues we faced in the early days of middleware and enterprise application integration (EAI).

So, these mashup vendors are jumping out ahead - now that there is easy access to data, we need to mash it all up for consumers to use it.... right? Sure, but... don't forget the data.

Take a read of Ken's last post about the importance of semantic integration as part of a SOA infrastructure strategy. Building services, and then jumping ahead to mashing up data forgets one key step - semantic integration. Mashups are sexy, but semantic integration make them valuable.