Yesterday, the SOA Consortium released a new podcast featuring Harvinder Kalsi, an IT architect in Cisco’s internal IT organization, on Cisco’s internal SOA story. Harvinder spoke at the SOA-C’s December meeting in Santa Clara.
Right after his talk, I tweeted “Cisco has great internal IT SOA story, could have listened all day”. My enthusiasm was for both the business-driven story and the speaker. From the range and depth of insights shared, it was abundantly clear that Harvinder actively participates in every facet of Cisco’s SOA initiative. And really, we all agree the best way to augment your SOA knowledge is from other practitioners.
This said, I highly recommend listening to the podcast of Harvinder’s talk. Also, if you plan to attend the upcoming IASA conference in Atlanta, be sure to attend Harvinder’s keynote session.
Here’s the podcast overview from my post on SOA Consortium Insights:
“Harvinder Kalsi, an IT architect in Cisco’s internal information technology organization, presented an insight packed case study at the SOA Consortium’s December meeting in Santa Clara on adopting a holistic SOA approach in support of Cisco’s business model expansion and IT enablement strategy.
Setting the presentation context, Kalsi shared that Cisco views SOA as the policies, principles and frameworks that enable business capabilities to be provided and consumed as sets of services. Starting with the business capabilities, Kalsi described Cisco’s business drivers, an expansion into software product lines, the corresponding business architecture work, defining business capability maps, and how Cisco’s existing IT applications, which were web services based, prevented the efficient addition or change of business capabilities. For illustration, Kalsi spoke to Cisco’s Commerce Transformation initiative and the use of services to support pricing and promotion capabilities.
In describing Cisco’s SOA approach, Kalsi shared artifacts, anecdotes and tips covering their four-step maturity process, major design concerns, and SOA platform. The SOA platform is comprised of these major components, service development framework, SOA dashboard, SOA registry, SOA gateway, business rules management, SOA governance and SOA governance lifecycle. Drilling into the SOA platform, Kalsi spoke of implementation challenges and the techniques used to address them, including open source, open standards and network-based services.
Throughout the presentation, Kalsi took questions from attendees on a range of topics including user and application security, governance automation, reconciling new subscriber demand with operational performance, service identification, investment and prioritization and cost and funding models.
In closing, Kalsi spoke of SOA success factors across people, process and technology dimensions, including the importance of business participation and business ownership of processes, policies and rules.
To listen to an audio recording of Harvinder Kalsi’s presentation and view the slides go here.”
[Disclosure: Cisco is not a client of Elemental Links; however, Cisco is a founding sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is a client of my company, Elemental Links.]
