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Measuring SOA ROI and Value

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(Disclaimer: I currently work for IONA Technologies)

My other alter-ego is back, Greg the Architect has a new episode out that talks about SOA ROI. First, we should all be afraid when there are too many acronyms used right next to each other…


Even though I have issue with the transparency of the sponsorship behind Greg, I have to admit that the episodes are very well done, highly relevant (as anyone who has been selling or buying enterprise technology, specifically SOA technology, can tell you), and funny.

Side Box: I do have to congratulate the TIBCO Marketing team. I was contacted by their Worldwide Direct of Marketing and was informed that they received an Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Award by the Web Marketing Association for the first episode of Greg the Architect. Dan and Ram, keep up the great work!

This episode talks about something that is near and dear to my heart, how to measure the value of technology. This is one of the corner stones of my new role at IONA. As part of the Customer Value Sales Team, I’m responsible for working with IONA’s west coast account teams to apply IONA’s value selling model, what we call the Value Assessment Program, to how our clients use IONA’s technology within their enterprises.

Everyone has heard the terms ROI and Value before. If you’re a buyer of technology you have heard countless vendors claim ROI numbers for their products or provide statements of value that you can achieve through the use of their products and/or solutions. If you are (or have been) a vendor selling technology then you have most likely been given ROI and value statements from your marketing department at some point to assist with your sales. You might have even used one of those magic ROI Calculator spreadsheets to help show a customer the value in hard numbers (more on that later).

I think this is a good topic to cause us to sit backwards on our horses to see where we have traveled over the past few years in technology with regards to RIO and Value.

A long, long time ago, back when you needed to go through 2+ years of serious and all encompassing training to receive the title of sales executive, value was something that described how a technology would directly impact your business. Granted, when dealing with new technologies there was a bit of faith involved in accepting the numbers. But that risk is what lead to great rewards. During the most recent bubble years, when a monkey wearing a vendor’s logo polo shirt could sell technology, the concept of understanding (or explaining) the business value that a technology purchase would create was considered “old fashioned”. How many millions of dollars were wasted…

The past five years has seen the industry pendulum swing back. Right after the bubble burst, technology companies started to realize this “new way” of selling technology, based on a calculated Return On Investment. Unfortunately, a lot of these ROI models were just smoke and mirrors reflecting MBA speak around a product. I have seen countless ROI calculators that would generate a positive ROI…even when all zeros were entered int them.

Now we are back full circle to businesses expecting to see financial validation behind their technology purchases. Most monkeys are back in the zoo (though I think we are running short on animal catchers), and an account executive for enterprise technology and solution companies are expected to be business partners of their customers. This means helping their customer use the technology to help address business problems their customers are facing or sometimes ones they don’t even see. This also includes explaining that business value in the customer’s business terms.

This was one of the primary reasons why I decided to join IONA almost a year ago. We have a dedicated team with executive support focused on helping us and our clients understand the value that can be achieved through the use of IONA’s Distributed SOA Infrastructure technology. Our Value Assessment Program (VAP) involves a commitment from both IONA and our clients to understand this value. This 30-45 day program consists leveraging IONA’s decade long set of experiences from Global 2000 companies to conduct focused interviews within a client’s organization, validate of the risk areas identified, and jointly craft a solutions to minimize these risk areas. This solution’s core is a value statement, built upon numbers provided and confirmed by the client’s people, detailing how this solution will impact the client’s business.

As I promised in my entry about recent changes back in February, I was planning on writing more about this Value Selling Methodology. I have not had a lot of entries on this topic since due to the success that we have been having with it in the field. I have been working clients over the past three months detailing how IONA can savee them millions of dollars in technology spend or create millions of dollars of business revenue thought the acceleration of their software development lifecycles.

Consider this my renewed pledge to start sharing more of this with you in the near future. To quote a good friend of mine “a couple of no-doze and a pot of coffee and I’ll be up all night writing manifestos.”

Pour me another cup!

My Other Alter-Ego

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Everyone has an alter ego out there in the world. I found out today that I’m lucky enough to have two. My first is my twin out of Rhode Island that is a musician and owns the domain of our names. (I’m still trying to figure out if we are related in the family tree or not…). The second I discovered this morning…Greg the Architect.


I was doing some SOA blog reading this morning when I came across Greg the Architect. This is Tibco’s way of trying to tap the viral and community marketing engine. As attempts by larger established IT vendors go…their attempt isn’t bad. It’s got the humor factor down pretty, I found my self laughing and thinking…”been there” (from both the client and vendor perspective). What will be interesting is to see if Tibco has the fortitude to do more of these and build something behind it. Viral marketing takes more than just a single shot to work…that is where most large companies tend to fall down, not willing to stay the course long enough to see the effect.I do find it interesting how the YouTube clip has no mention of Tibco as the vendor behind the clip. The end of the video clip mentions SOA Now Journal, which is a “thought leadership” site that is authored by Tibco. Tibco is using Greg as a way to drive people to this website. Personally, I have issue with the lack of transparency behind both of these.

Tibco, don’t hide the fact that your doing both of these…it usually burns the audience you’re trying to capture. At the same time, don’t swing the other way and make these both Tibco items. There is a middle ground in there that has to be found…I think there close, but think they need to be a bit more up front with their involvement.

Either way, I found it funny and worth sharing.

Why IONA Bought C24

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(Disclaimer: I am currently employed by IONA as a Senior Solutions Consultant. See general disclaimer to the right.)

This past week, IONA announced the acquisition of C24 Technologies out of the United Kingdom. IONA has had a reseller agreement with C24 Technologies for quite some time that matched the strengths of our two companies for the greater benefit of mostly our financial services clients. This acquisition is a great example of complimentary products and people joining forces to provide truly differentiated value.

I have been working with the C24 IO tool (re-branded by IONA as Artix IO) for the past seven months at various Fortune 100 financial firms. IO (Integration Objects) is a data mapping and translation tool that enables model driven data management. Not only does IO come preconfigured with in depth knowledge of standard financial industry message formats, but it provides a graphical data mapping tool for building data translation models, it can convert these models into transformation rules, and generate optimized java code based upon the data mapping models. IO also has the ability to provide constraints to message validations that go beyond what’s available today with XML schemas or XPATH; and these constraints can be applied to any message format. Data models generated with IO currently process trillions of dollars of financial transactions daily around the globe.

Side Box: John Davies, co-founder and CTO for C24, enjoys showing prospective clients how IO can handle the intricacies of complex message schemes like SWIFT, FpML, and ISO 20022 and then providing the test schemas to the client to have them try the same test with the other data mapping tools they are evaluating…he hasn’t come across an instance yet where the other tools didn’t fall over on some part of the schema’s intricacies. After spending over two decades in the financial services industry dealing with these complex message formats, John and the C24 team has ensured that IO can handle the complicated formats that enable electronic banking in today’s world. (John also did an interview with TheServerSide.com on the acquisition.)

To provide some contextual background, IONA’s Artix family of distributed SOA infrastructure products enable true distributes service integration and has been in use for years within both the Financial Services and Telecommunications markets. The entire concept of SOA is about service enabling functionality within your enterprise and making that functionality available to anyone who needs to access it. Any point in your enterprise could directly consume a service within the enterprise to leverage its functionality. Enabling this type of efficient point to point connectivity using standards based message formats and transports is the genesis of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) concept. That concept seems to have gotten diluted over the past few years during the conversion of existing applications server stacks into essentially ESB Hubs that all service consumption must pass through. Artix is a truly distributed technology that embraces this ESB concept. (For further discussion on the Stacks versus Distributed concept, see William Henry’s Gravity of the Hubs postings).

By hosting the model generated Java code from IO within the Artix runtime on the distributed services within an enterprise, Financial Service clients gain the combined benefit of efficient distributed services with robust model driven data mapping for financial message formats. This allows a firm to choose the best way to service enable an application based upon the unique technical, business, or political architecture of their organization. And they can do it in the incremental value driven approach that has become the new standard within the maturing technology industry over the past five years.

I am very excited about the joining of IONA and C24. I foresee some exciting case studies coming in the future as we continue to work with our large financial services clients on Artix and IO based solutions; and as the combined team continues to expand IO’s preconfigured message format understanding beyond financial services.