We're nearing the end (for now - we have more planned, but not for a little while) of a series of SOA vendor interviews with this one, which we conducted recently with Rob Myer of TIBCO. Rob works in Product Management at TIBCO with responsibility for SOA.

We ask the usual four questions, and along the way swing by some interesting conversation points:

• What you need from infrastructure in order to move towards enterprise-wide SOA, and what TIBCO learned from telecoms companies' service platform requirements
• The challenges associated with the WS-Policy, WS-Management and WSDM standards
• The application of CEP (complex event processing) technology to managed service delivery in the context of SLAs.

This podcast episode is 34'28" long.

Here's another in our series of interviews with vendors offering SOA "solutions". This time we spoke to Miko Matsumura, head of product marketing for SOA at webMethods.
In this 25'34" conversation we ask the usual four questions - and also chat about the importance of webMethods' SOA Link program, the role of the Infravio Governance Rules Engine, and SOA as an enabler of federated/cross enterprise business processes.

Here's the fourth in our series of interviews with vendors offering SOA related products and services. This time it's the turn of Kris Horrocks, who's a Technical Product Manager in the Connected Systems Division of Microsoft. (The Connected Systems Division was formed in 2005 as part of the Server and Tools business, and it brings together work on .NET, BizTalk, CardSpace and other related things).

As usual we talk through our standard four questions. In the resulting conversation we explore:

• how Microsoft deals with customers' questions about scalability and interoperability
• the importance of "high fidelity handoffs" between IT practices in quality service delivery
• how the SOA offering fits with Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and support for "design for operations", and what this means for managing service lifecycles.

The podcast episode lasts 34'41".

Here's the third in our series of interviews with SOA vendors. This week it's the turn of Roman Stanek - one of the founders of Systinet, which was bought by Mercury (which was then in turn bought by HP a few months back).

The 31'17" interview has some great stuff in it. As we ask our usual four questions about HP and Systinet SOA offerings, we swing past:

• scenarios where the standardisation and interoperability that SOA introduces are particularly important
• how SOA is about outcomes, not protocols (with reference to the SOAP vs REST debate)
• how SOA wil disappear from the IT industry's lexicon in the coming years, because it will become a standard feature of the IT landscape
• the effect that SOA has on the software development lifecycle, and how the loose coupling that it introduces into development organisations and processes brings requirements for strong management of service lifecycles and service quality.

Our second SOA vendor interview was with BEA's Martin Percival yesterday. Again we followed our standard format - and in the resulting 34'30" podcast we get into discussing:

• BEA's experience of delivering "information as a service" projects within SOA initiatives
• How SOA is about more than just WS-* technology
• BEA's transition from a pure Java implementation focus to a broader focus, re-embracing its "legacy" middleware platform Tuxedo, the Microsoft expertise of its Plumtree acquisition, and also pointing to the SCA/SDO effort that it's a member of
• Why it bought Flashline (a software development repository vendor) and didn't buy a SOA registry vendor (it partners with Systinet/Mercury/HP)
• How its SOA 360 initiative will impact on the admin & management of the BEA platform.

This is the first of what we hope will be a series of podcasts with CIOs who've instigated work to improve IT-business alignment in their organisations. The interview is with New Zealand-resident Peter Burggraaff, until recently the CIO of NZ retail chain Farmers Trading Company. Peter talks to us in this 31'34" podcast episode about his initiative at Farmers and the outcomes he achieved.

In the podcast Peter explains that Farmers was in a situation where IT cost was way too high, and although the IT organisation was doing some things well (particularly managing operational services) it wasn't seen as a real contributor of business value as Farmers looked to put some big business changes in place. He goes on to explain how he started to turn this situation around and built a solid and trusted relationship with Farmers business management.

This podcast came about following the work we did last year on our Technology Garden book (out in April), and as mentioned above we hope to be doing more of these over the coming weeks and months. Thanks Peter!

If you'd like to get involved in this programme of podcasts don't hesitate to let us know.

We interviewed David yesterday and asked him our standard questions. Considering it was the first interview, we think it went OK...

There were a couple of interesting things to come out of the interview:

1. Cape Clear markets itself as an ESB vendor, but its view of what is "in" an ESB is much broader than that of most other vendors - David in particular calls out BPEL-based service orchestration
2. the sweet spot for the company is really a "mainstream", "mid-market" company which may not have much in the way of deep in-house web services or SOA technology skills
3. the company is currently working quite a lot in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other commercial service delivery scenarios - helping companies in the digital service delivery business create more sophisticated and valuable services
4. David also specifically calls out the need for potential SOA "customers" to make clear distinctions between management of SOA-related technology, and management of the automated processes supported by that technology. These are two separate problems with different solution needs, and they should be evaluated as such
5. it's pretty obvious from the conversation, we think, that Cape Clear is very firmly a technology company selling its capability as a standards-based middleware solution to integration problems. This makes it quite different from many of the other SOA players, which position themselves almost as business change agents.