Ron Schmelzer

Reducing the cost of IT management is one of the primary pressures for most organizations. One of the most common ways to reduce such costs is to enable the reuse of applications that developers have already created and configured for the enterprise. In the past decade, especially in the past 3-5 years, companies have spent millions of dollars on enterprise software applications of all sorts: CRM, ERP, and other operational applications. The next few years will be less about new application development, and more about existing application integration and reuse. The Service-oriented approach helps solve the challenge of reuse by imposing a design methodology that promotes the use of self-describing, published, loosely coupled, and dynamically bound components rather than static, tightly-coupled components. Reuse becomes a matter of publishing available Web Services ... (more)

Who's Architecting the Cloud?

Interarbor Solutions Blog As the hype cycle for the cloud computing continues to gather steam, an increasing number of end users are starting to see the silver lining, while others are simply lost in the fog. It is clear that the debate over the definition, business model, and benefits of cloud will continue for some time, but it is also clear that the sluggish economic environment is increasing the appeal of having someone else pay for the robust infrastructure needed to run one’s applications. Yet, all this talk of leveraging cloud capabilities, or perhaps even building one’s ... (more)

How I Became a REST 'Convert'

Many of you know me as one half of the ZapThink team – an advisor, analyst, sometimes-trainer, and pundit that has been focused on XML, web services, service oriented architecture (SOA), and now cloud computing over the past decade or so. Some you may also know that immediately prior to starting ZapThink I was one of the original members of the UDDI Advisory Group back in 2000 when I was with ChannelWave, and I also sat on a number of standards bodies including RosettaNet, ebXML, and CPExchange initiatives. Furthermore, as part of the ZapThink team, I tracked the various WS-* sta... (more)

SOA Pundits Unite to Chat about SOA Futures

Notable SOA experts and pundits are getting together to explore the future of SOA at the ZapForum evening networking event in Washington, DC on October 1, 2009 from 5:30PM to 8:30PM. At ZapForum DC, dozens of experts, pundits, and influential guests will gather for an evening of networking and discussion on the topics of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Architecture (EA). Open to public enrollment and attendance, the ZapForum events provide a way to encourage dialogue, networking, and communication within the SOA and EA communities. "The enterprise architect an... (more)

Content as Services

Content is information that is intended for human consumption, as opposed to "data," which are information intended for machine or system use. At times, we use other words such as knowledge, semantics, and intellectual assets to describe content. What differentiates human-oriented content from machine-oriented data is that people must create, manage, publish, and distribute content so that it can be represented in a variety of different ways, all the while maintaining the same overall meaning. Content represents information such as news, facts, fiction, charts, illustrations, ph... (more)