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The last session before lunch was by Robert Wiseman, CTO of Sabre Holdings — interesting that the two customer keynotes this morning were both by travel-related companies. They have the same problems as many other organizations, in that they have to deal with large numbers of transactions and compete on pricing, but they’re doing it at a much higher volume and with a much greater abandonment rate than most other companies: think about how many times that you use Travelocity (one of their companies) to search for prices versus how often you actually book the travel.

Wiseman talked about how it’s necessary to focus on the differentiators: their business is differentiated by the quality and quantity of content that they provide to their customers, and the level of efficiency that enables the customers to locate and consume the content that’s right for them. Everything else, as he says, is just plumbing. In that plumbing, they push towards a “cookie cutter architecture”, where technology is commoditized which in turn makes for easier build and test cycles, and improves time to market as well as TCO.

They design for technology obsolescence by staying as vendor agnostic as possible, and abstracting the technology layers.

They also design for failure: since they run 20,000 transactions per second, 24×7, all technology will eventually fail, and the fail-overs must be obvious to the operational support staff but transparent to users. The goal, in the case of failure, is to continue limping along in some fashion rather than a total meltdown.

They design for flexibility, using XML-based APIs and web services against some rather ancient mainframe technology; however, they’re now redesigning some of their web services to be less granular (so as to not invoke 30 million web service calls per day) based on tracking consumer behaviour on the website. This is an interesting concept for designing the right granularity of web services: implement your best guess, tending to be more granular, then watch the behaviour and rebuild them into less granular services.

As you might imagine given their transaction volumes, they’re very focussed on performance testing, and designing for the purposes of facilitating performance testing by standardizing hardware (e.g., blade servers) and software (e.g., DBMS) so that it’s possible to test a full range of situations. He stressed how important it is to consider performance testing at design time, not just as an afterthought.

In the Q&A, he talked more about their standardization and reuse efforts: pretty thorough at the infrastructure and even the middleware layers, but not so easy at the application layers. They’ve standardized on Linux, which an audience question referred to as “open source shareware”, which was a bit funny — they’re using a supported version of Linux, so it’s not like they’re pirating software from the internet or something. He also made an interesting comment about how the best strategy for staying vendor independent when you have a single source is to have a really good exit strategy for that vendor’s products: don’t stay with it just because it’s too hard to migrate away from it.

I saw Sandy Carter speak a week ago at the Gartner BPM conference, and as expected, there’s some amount of overlap from what I heard there in the first section on what’s driving business today and the nature of globally-integrated enterprises. Less talk about BPM (since this isn’t a BPM conference) and much more on SOA and how it contributes to these types of enterprises.

She covers off four distinct styles or paths of SOA:

• Foundational, which is focussed on proven, high-ROI projects; typically there’s only 5% of functions as services, and less than 10% reuse of these services.
• Extend end-to-end, with optimization and innovation across the entire value chain using BPM, with up to 40% of functions expressed as services, and up to 20% of services reused.
• Transform, where the business model is being transformed and IT provides a strategic advantage; up to 50% of functions are expressed as services, and up to 80% reusable.
• Adapt dynamically, where the technology becomes invisible and predictive business functions drive process innovation; more than 80% of functions are expressed as services, and more than 50% are reusable.

She went through each of these in detail, with examples, and talked about how and why each of the approaches are typically selected from both the business and technology standpoint.

There was a booklet distributed to each of us when the session started written by Carter, entitled “The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0”, and she used it as a launch point to discuss enterprise mashups and how they can be used to extend the use of SOA. There’s been lots written about mashups as the global SOA; like BPM, mashups are a primary consumer of services that help to increase reusability and therefore cost-justify SOA in the first place. She showed us some nice services-based mashups that IBM has built for their own internal use; as usual, I wish that IBM would move the internal stuff out to the real world a lot sooner since it seems that they’re doing some really interesting stuff internally that takes years to reach the market.

She then introduced Mohammed Farooz, CTO of the state of Texas, to talk about their Health and Human Services department and the transformational work that they’ve done. They’ve moved from a single channel client interaction model (where each program had its own client interaction) to a multi-channel client interaction where all programs were available to citizens through a common interface, whether they were doing web self-service or calling in to the call center. They accomplished this with an agile business framework (business modeling, capability management, performance management and governance) on top of a flexible SOA stack (Rational, WebSphere and a few other IBM bits).

Carter wrapped up with some comments on end-to-end process integrity — interaction, transactional and information — and how IBM is focussing on this. She showed the same video about Second Life “BPM Flight Simulator” as we saw last week. When they talk about simulating business processes within a simulated environment, I still just have to shake my head, although apparently there’s a greater retention rate for people using this for training versus traditional methods.