Jason Bloomberg

Amid the posturing and recriminations following this past December’s ill-fated terrorist attack by the Nigerian Christmas bomber, the underlying cause of the intelligence breach has gone all but unnoticed. how is it the global post-9/11 anti-terrorist machine could miss a lone Nigerian with explosives in his underwear? After all, chatter included reference to “the Nigerian,” his own father gave warning, he was on a terrorist watch list, and he purchased a one-way ticket to Detroit, paid cash, and checked no luggage. You’d think any one of these bits of information would set off alarms, and the fact that the intelligence community missed the lot is a sign of sheer incompetence, right? Not so fast. Such a conclusion is actually fallacious. The missing piece of the puzzle... (more)

Scaling SOA

Based upon conversations with architects in ZapThink’s Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) course, our High Performance SOA ZapFlash back in the fall of 2006 was a bit ahead of its time. In 2006, most architects were simply focusing on how to put SOA implementations together, but today, the focus has unquestionably shifted to how to make SOA implementations enterprise-class. As a result, t... (more)

The Four Stages of SOA Governance

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 gear, they're typically talking about SOA governance in the narrow. SOA governance in the broad, in contrast, ... (more)

The SOA Marketing Paradox and the Wizard of Oz

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 struggled to tell the proper SOA story for their products in a way that leads to increased sales and happy customers. ... (more)

Are Services Nouns or Verbs?

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 us a particular thrill, because we received kudos from enterprise architects for streamlining the connections b... (more)