Panel: Open-Source SOA Gains Ground

NEW YORK—Investment banks' appetite for open-source technology continues to grow, but the community is split on the efficacy of commercializing service-oriented architecture (SOA) open-source projects to further the adoption of the technology.

Open source is "moving in," says Omer Soykan, senior vice president of investment banking technology at Jefferies & Company. Jefferies has used Java-based reporting tool JasperReports for its reporting tools and Soykan says it works well. Linux, Tomcat, Hibernate, and JBoss are also "very actively used," says Soykan, who spoke at the annual Web Services/SOA on Wall Street Show in Manhattan last week.

Dennis Reedy, vice president of advanced technology at GigaSpaces, says the vendor has taken a philanthropic approach toward open source. "Open standards that are fostered through open software and through technical licenses really help people with adoption," he says.

"Fusing economics with the open-source environment is really presenting an interesting model for licensing and for these technologies to become more real and develop into a true enterprise," Reedy says.

Dennis Callaghan, an enterprise software analyst with consultancy 451 Group, says he is skeptical of the licensing model format. "There is an impetus toward developing open-source technology that is not being met by the commercial software vendors," he says.

He says Mule, an open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform, "was actually developed for a transaction-intensive financial environment and there was nothing on the market to license software that could do what this application could do."

He says a company called MuleSource has tried to come up with a commercial model to provide support services for that project.

"It is going to end up costing you a lot of money if you want to get that professional kind of support behind you," he says.

Reedy says GigaSpaces contributes and provides support for Mule, "so that really reinforces our model of embracing open source in a vehicle" that will spur the adoption of technologies and potentially introduce it to the marketplace, he says.

David McFarlane, COO of Java tool provider Nexaweb Technologies, has "no doubt about the genuine intent" of open-source projects. There is "sufficient momentum to truly deliver open source" but he says he cautions against being "wooed by the concept of open source" and says that there needs to be "professional support for mission-critical environments."

Earlier this year, Wachovia took SOA into consideration when adopting grid computing for multi-asset-class trading capabilities (DWT, Jan. 29).

Consultancy Accenture last year stepped up its work on SOAs by announcing a partnership with Sun Microsystems whereby the two would jointly develop identity-enabled SOA applications and create an innovation center (DWT, Sept. 18, 2006).

Chloe Albanesius

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