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I'm Roger Sippl. In the '80's and '90s, I founded three companies –
- Informix with its data dictionaries and relational algebra,
- Vantive and its meta data-driven applications and multi-tier architecture, and
- Visigenic with its application server and distributed computing capabilities.
All three companies pioneered new approaches to enterprise computing and the way that business is conducted using technology.
While both Informix and Vantive delivered significant architectural advances, unfortunately they also contributed to the proliferation
of database and application silos we have today. Fortunately, Visigenic was a pre-cursor to the emergence of service-oriented
architecture (SOA), which has set the stage to knock down these silos.
The principles of SOA, embodied in the simple and straight forward standards of Web services, do an excellent job of addressing
syntax and protocol-level communications.
But Web services are only part of the picture. They don't solve the problem of semantic interoperability, i.e., resolving the data
and process disparities between different services.
This led me to a new solution. Applying what I learned at my three previous companies, I could develop a Structured Query Language,
"SQL" for services by collecting information (as meta data) about various services and then developing algebraic manipulations for them
at run-time.
With this services modeling and relationship system, we could break down the silo walls of enterprise application servers, once and
for all, just as the relational database management system did for the silos of data files.
In order to understand why I think SOA has come to the rescue, it's important to know how we got into the silo mess in the
first place. This vision brief is about how we can realize the vision of SOA and finally break down the silo walls.
Breaking Down the Silo Walls White Paper (PDF)
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