This blog
…is an invitation to everyone interested (this includes You, too!) to discuss topics around solutions, application or product architectures, designs, implementations… And Best Practices on architectural topics, such as (but not limited to) Business Architectures, EIM, MDM, Event and Service Orientation, Scalability, Enterprise Integration, Application Integration, Enterprise Architecture, Cloud/XaaS and more…everything the Architect’s Heart desires 🙂
The views expressed here are those of the author(s), and do not reflect the views of his/her/their employer.
Andreas ‘Andy’ Spanner
..has been in Architecture pretty much all his working IT life. Firstly without really knowing it. Drawing boxes was just so much fun! 🙂
I was 26 when I took over the management of my first development team consisting of 20 Software Engineers from all over the planet. Before that I delivered with a great team and a great CEO what we called the LanShield Distribution Center (LDC), which was a world wide operating Portal that would allow distributors to manage and the Content Based Firewall appliance to configure and download updates remotely. LDC was based on M$ SQL server, Transact-SQL, PKI and ASP. Yes, I know it wouldn’t scale very well, but we had the maximum load scenarios per region (North America, Europe, APAC) worked out. That was all with a company called Webdefender. I had an awesome time with the guys there.
After that I got into the Automotive Industry, also in Germany. Those guys have a pretty tough life. Just-In-Time and in Sequence-Delivery combined with manufacturing process optimisation is nothing you do on a Sunday afternoon. I learned about J2EE Architectures and Logistics. Again great and smart people I’ve worked with both on shore and off shore. The first deployment of a Series production configuration went live in Tunesia in late 2004.
The year after I found my self waking up in Canada, working on several logistics hand held and server side development projects. My main focus however was managing the delivery of Canon’s Field Service Management Application for all of Canada, which went live end of 2005.
The weather then got warmer due to the fact that I moved to Australia in order to spend several years with IBM in the Australian Development Lab (ADL). In the ADL I worked on the development, support and client relationships for IBMs Web Content Management system. Later I moved into a WebSphere Architect role within Sales, managing IBMs Technical WebSphere Channel Business across Australia/New Zealand and got to work as a Cloud Evangelist speaking about the IBM Test/Dev Cloud and AWS in front of larger audiences. I had the pleasure to work once again with a great Manager, great team. Loved it.
The desire to gain more industry knowledge made me move into the Financial Industry and Banking sector, building up expertise in Enterprise Integration, Data Quality and Master Data Management initiatives. I got TOGAF Enterprise Architecture certified early 2011 and enjoy working in the EA space. My focus on the ‘goodness’ IT can bring to the business has been very rewarding and insightful (to not say enlightening).
After managing software and services innovation with the leader in the Document Management and Business Process Outsourcing industry, I was tasked to build out and head up the Enterprise Architecture function at Fuji Xerox during several larger business transformation projects within a centralised (EPMO) and decentralised setup.
I have since joined the leading Open Source software company to learn once again more about the leading edge of technology, new methodologies and Community Powered Innovation as part of Business Innovation & Digital Transformation initiatives.
Hi Andy,
I hope you are well. While I was surfing on the web for data quality firewalls I have come to your blog. Currently I am also working as an enterprise architect in banking industry. I have read your blog, which is witten on 2011, on SOA vs EDA. It is really interesting point that EDA is superior than SOA. Then I began thinking whether we can connect all the systems (even modules in a software!) with just EDA. Then I came to some websites which talks about EDA and SOA side by side implementation, which are currently utilizing in our bank.
Can you please comment on SOA vs EDA again and write down your thoughts?
Thank you very much.
Regards,
MA
Hi MA,
Thanks for your message.
Re SOA vs EDA – depends, both have merit.
I believe that for system-to-system integration EDA is superior as it decouples systems, which is especially important in a distributed context eg across regionally/globally dispersed systems/nodes/data centers/availability zones. But even in the same data centre you don’t want to ‘disable’ your payments because of a maintenance window of your core banking system – hence I believe EDA is the better alternative. EDA will require some smarts around error handling, eg if a message cannot be consumed due to technical, data or business errors – it gets trickier if message sequence is of importance.
I love the linkedIn article where centralised logs are used to synch systems:
https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying
I like ReST/JSON based SOA (in the purest synchronous request/response sense) for user interaction. Where SOA based system-to-system interaction needs to implement complex retries and undo logic, we can simply leave it up to the user to hit the retry button or cancel when trying to bring up the online transaction summary of the last 30 days.
HATEOAS is a good concept to re-visit wrt this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
I think you are spot on with your ‘connecting the software modules via EDA’ comment. The mega-vendors want to sell us their ‘fully integrated stack’ which turns out to be actually a disadvantage for business operations (such as Supply Chain for example) as we cannot easily expose business events. Just recently during a larger ERP migration we were not able to expose Order Status updates within the Order2Cash domain out of Oracles EBS in the correct sequence (ordered by time, so nothing fancy but directly impacting customer experience!) due to the lack of this functionality, because it was a ‘fully integrated stack’ of EBS modules.
Check this post for John’s view: https://allthingsarchitecture.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/enterprise-integration-back-to-the-roots/
Keen to get your thoughts if you’d like to discuss further.
Andreas