 Hello everybody and welcome to this the second webinar in our series SOA in the Digital Age. The first webinar in the series, Developments in SOA, discussed how SOA met the challenge of integration between multiple independent applications and technologies with proprietary interfaces. From the beginning it has given enterprises agility so that they can easily work with new business partners. But even in the early days of SOA more was expected. SOA enthusiasts believed that the principle of service orientation would transform businesses and that its application to information technology would give business executives more direct control of the creation of IT solutions. Enterprises would then have a different form of agility, the ability to implement new business ideas easily and quickly. This expectation was not at first realized. SOA often remained within the IT department and became known as a style of IT architecture rather than as a business transformation tool. But the desire of business people to control IT solution development more directly has increased since those days and a new kind of person has emerged within the modern enterprise the business technologist who works in a business department and understands the business but also has the technical expertise to create IT solutions to support it. So the time has come to revisit SOA and see whether its early expectations can now be fulfilled and that is the topic for this webinar. I will be facilitating the discussion. I'm Chris Harding the Director for Interoperability at the Open Group and we have a distinguished panel. Dr Ali Asanjani is a distinguished engineer and CTO Smarter Process ECM SOA in Emerging Technologies with IBM. He is a leader of the Smarter Process method community and the SOA community within IBM and he's been a leader of SOA methodology since the early days. Marty Newhart is an SOA and Application Integration Architect in HP Enterprise Service Applications Business Services. And he's also a co-chair for the Open Group SOA for Business Technology project and he contributes to our SOA working group. Within HP Marty is the chair of the Global Technical Council for the Integration and Middleware and Presentation Suites on the HP Edge platform. He also teaches web application development at Binghampton University. Gerard Peters is a managing consultant with Capgemini in the Netherlands. He studied originally business econometrics operations research at Tilburg University and joined a Dutch predecessor of Capgemini. He has been involved with a number of Open Group activities and is currently involved in the SOA for Business Technology work group at the Open Group. Sundar Ramanathan is a manager IT advisory with Stund Young. He's a BE of the Indian Institute of Science and Bangalore and MBA of Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan in the United States. He's been an enterprise and integration architect at a number of major corporations and also a senior database product developer at Infomix. He's a co-chair of the SOA for Business Technology project and has contributed to other projects within the Open Group. Last but not least, Shah Santhiglari is a lead technical architect in the Chief Technology Office of American Express Technology. He is an enterprise architecture practitioner who has led the development of several enterprise frameworks at AET. Prior to joining Amex, Shah held a number of titles of staff programmer, infrastructure architect and senior architect at several companies. He's represented American Express in the Open Group for several years and brings a real end user perspective to this discussion. So I've mentioned the SOA for Business Technology project. This is a project of our SOA work group whose aim is to develop guidelines and taxonomy based on capabilities, service categorization and metrics to align SOA and business with a mechanism to assess, improve and express SOA in business terms, which is a very relevant topic for discussion today, but it's not the real topic for discussion. The topic that we will be discussing today is quite simply how service oriented architecture enables enterprises to achieve their business objectives. So with that introduction, I'd like to start and ask the panelists the first question. I'm going to ask a number of questions and then we will have a pause for questions from the audience. First question and Shah, can I ask you to take this question first? Could you just start us off with some specific examples of SOA delivering business value, please? Thanks Chris. Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Based on where you are, let me start by saying that it is a pleasure to be here and participate in this webinar. Thanks for arranging this, Chris, and the open group. So let me start by saying that a prime example at AMEX is leveraging SOA for increasing return on investment. So at AMEX we are continually working to increase the efficiency and cost effectiveness of our technology delivery to help drive increased business and customer value by getting our product and services to market faster and with higher quality. Now with SOA, when services are reused across different lines of business, platforms, partners, and or applications, this definitely drives faster to speak to market, increase cost effectiveness and higher quality, resulting of course to higher ROI. And of course that in turn drives increased value for our partners in American Express business and by extension to our partners customers. Okay, so American Express is finding, I guess is deploying SOA on a significant extent and is finding that it is giving business value, it is delivering return on investment. That's I guess is the message that you're giving us there, Shah. Yes, we actually have a strategic SOA transformation program and that program leveraging SOA has definitely helped us with delivering more business value. Okay, thanks for that input. Marty, could I ask you next to share some thoughts on examples of SOA delivering business value? Yeah, that's great. Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me and I echo what Shah said earlier. What I wanted to add is just kind of extend what Shah had said. It not only brings value to your partners but bringing value back to the business by exposing a lot of your internal services to external parties to actually innovate for you. So when Shah talked about partners being able to take advantage of what's been done at American Express, I'm sure American Express has also been able to see value by partners being able to innovate off of the services that are offered by American Express. So I think that extension from SOA into being able to not just manage everything that you have internally to your business but expose that business value elsewhere and allow other people to drive change for you is very valuable as well. Okay, so it's not just delivering value to the business itself but because it enables the business to expose its capabilities as services, it's delivering value to other partners in the ecosystem, we could say. Exactly and also just quickly on that is driving that back to American Express as well and allowing the partners to innovate for them to allow those services to be offered in ways that maybe American Express hadn't thought of. Okay, so that's giving a loop or a virtuous circle shall we say of value add. Gerard, would you like to go next? Yeah definitely and I would even like to take this one step further because in this context I would like to differentiate between SOA old school, SOA new school, new school in the sense that the focus of SOA in the past was mainly limited in restructuring IT facilities. And that was mainly to, as we saw, had it prevent applicative duplications and by doing so reducing costs and improve stability and provide definitely some service to the business. But although it evolved it kept focused on the IT facilities and it was only the service-oriented station was only applied to the shaping of the IT organizations. I think what I want to take it to is to talk about something like the new school SOA in which service orientation is applied in the full perspective of shaping organization. So that means that also in the business architecture the service concept is applied in order for the IT SOA to be of real added value. So here SOA is not limited to purely shaping the IT facilities and is not focused on cost reduction but it is more about service delivering of organizations. And from that perspective I have seen SOA delivering business value in an actual situation where we really applied the service concept in reshaping the entire architecture and in archimage terminology from all three layers, business application and technique. And in doing so we were able to design an application service landscape that was fully aligned with the organizational view on services to be delivered to the outside world. So I think looking at SOA currently should also involve shaping the business as a whole with the service orientation actually. And I think that really is a step forward to integrate the IT facilities with the business dynamics. Okay so you're saying that the real value comes when not only the technology but the business is service oriented? Yeah I think so. Okay so that's a good perspective. Linda, I think you're now off mute. Would you like to share a few thoughts? Okay thanks for organizing the webinar. So one of the things I just wanted to extend what Marty as well as Gerard explained. Another important thing I noticed is the creation of the services also extends for the new and emerging multiple channels. Like social, mobile and cloud-based service rendition by taking some of the internal services that need to be exposed for consumption by consumers and also with the proper security and controls to partners as well so that the smartphone ecosystem as well as the tablets and other devices could be enabled as well. With the same service instead of recreating services again and again. This emphasizes reuse as well as a lot of opportunities to extend to the mobile app and social channel scenarios. Okay so that's a topic which we might go into in a bit more depth as we go further. The way that SOA is used in combination with new technologies. Ali do you have examples of SOA delivering business value that you can share with us? Yes, hi everyone, hi Chris. So delivering business value I think one of the critical things is that business outcomes need to happen. And if you want a business outcome to happen it needs to happen at a given point in time when the business promises some functionality or capability. Remember let's say it's a bank where you can take a picture of your check and it gets deposited in your account or if there's a claim that needs to happen you're right there at a scene of God forbid an accident and you can take a picture of the accident and start the claim process immediately. So a lot of what we have in terms of SOA was the ability to expose business capability, business services that were business relevant, business significant capabilities from an IT perspective. And this exposure has led to various different technologies maturing and extending SOA. But fundamentally they all are grounded in the best practices that we've been experiencing over the past 10, 15 years around SOA. And what that does is it enables the achievement of business value by not only exposing a set of services by integrating them with a lot of these more current technologies and trends such as the examples that I provided. So whether you choose to use a very light form of implementation of SOA like a RESTful API or you would like to use a more transaction safe kind of implementation such as SOAP or more traditional kinds of message interaction, all of these have their place in the enterprise and across the ecosystem. And they all can deliver a certain degree of business value because fundamentally services and SOA align themselves with a portfolio of services that are the capabilities that the business cares about that relies on or expects either from a provider or consumer perspective. And so if the business can provide the services in a ready fashion so that others can expose, explore and leverage them, then it can deliver greater business value. And we've been seeing that across the board in different industries where SOA has been an enabler so that business can reach those business outcomes and thus deliver business value. Okay, that's a good perspective. Timeliness of value is crucial. Let's move on to the next question if we may. It's often said that a major benefit of SOA is agility. So can we start this one please with Marty. Can you take us through what happens in an enterprise that uses SOA when someone wants to implement a new business idea and how this is different from what happens in enterprises that don't use SOA? Okay, great. Yeah, so let's take Allie's example of being able to upload a claim or take a picture of your check and submit that. In times past when you didn't or if a business didn't really implement SOA they wouldn't have really been able to open up their architecture and open up their SOA systems, right? Maybe their system was built that you go to the bank and you give the bank check over and they're able to deposit the check there and then enter the information into their system, right? And they have a very heavy client server type integration for security reasons and that's the only way that you can actually enter a deposit into the system. When you follow SOA principles and you understand all of the policy and you understand all of the pieces, you're able to start breaking up some of those SOA type systems and start to allow the ability for different angles for that information to be entered into a system. So if you take the check example, now I'm able to put a check into an ATM and it's able to read it and put that information into the network and cash the check for me. You know, by opening that up and opening up a service that is a deposit service, right? Where that might have been in a tightly coupled scenario before. Now that's loosely coupled because, you know, service orientation says, all right, the business service is actually getting the money into the bank. It doesn't matter how it happens so let's expose that service. And that's really one of the biggest differences between looking at the service that you offer and having the business say, okay, well, what is it that I offer to the community, to my customers? And what is it that I can do, you know, that's a service, right? That might not be part of my overarching business process necessarily, but it really is one of those services that I can offer and offer in many different ways. And then people, then I go back to, you know, beating the drum on innovation because now people are able to say, okay, well, I want to be able to take a picture of my check and send that information in. Where you have a client server, that's very difficult because it's not, you know, ready for mobile technology and things like that. But if you have that service open, then I take the picture of the check. It reads the information that I need. It sends that information into the service and the deposit happens. So that's the difference to me is really that breaking apart of those, you know, stovepipe applications and allowing, you know, open information flow. Okay, Ali, do you agree? Is that a sort of fair development of your example from your perspective? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right on. And really what we have is we have an economy of services essentially. Some people refer to it as an API economy because gradually over time, you know, the key thing I want to make sure everybody kind of, I share at least my experiences that everybody understands from my perspective, and I think, you know, we're all kind of on the same page here, is that foundationally, service-oriented architecture has paved the way for all these other technologies to enable themselves. And fundamentally what's happening is that we are reaching beyond the silos or the organizational boundaries of an enterprise. And we're entering into an ecosystem of what I think the open group calls the boundless flow of information in a sense. And that allows companies and third parties to interact with one another to compose solutions that would otherwise be very difficult to compose. And one of the critical things, I think, is the ability for us to expose the capabilities that we have in our own organizations, whatever domain, whether we're in retail or distribution or healthcare or provider, financial services, as we expose this into the ecosystem, whether it's, and by the way, there are two ecosystems. There's the internal developer ecosystem, which is extremely important. 60% initially will be in the enterprise, inside the enterprise, and then gradually we have more and more uptake externally in third parties in the external ecosystem. And they will leverage and develop these exposed services and combine them in unintended ways to provide new innovations and new innovative solutions that can open the doors to new partnerships, new markets, and new products and services. The key thing is the ability for us to foundationally create a portfolio of services that are business aligned, understand the dependencies between these services, expose them internally and externally in a secure way within the two ecosystems of internal and external ecosystems, and enable this partner ecosystem to start developing applications based on these exposed services. Okay. Thanks, Charlie. So the service portfolio comes out there as a crucial tool in implementing new business ideas by taking existing services. Chris, this is Gerard. I would like to add something. Yeah, sure. Yeah, because I think what was mentioned by Ali triggers something at my side. As you may understand, I'm more from the business side and I think we are at the moment in time that we should leave the idea that there is a separate IT department fully separated in centralized ways and separated from the business function and that that would be able to provide full entrepreneurial flexibility. So as Ali mentioned, there is a lot of improvement done by creating those services within the IT environment. But I think by including that service mind in the business and structuring the business is a real enabler for organizational flexibility. And I think the workgroup SOA for business technology is indeed about explaining that service orientation should be included in the entire setup of the business for those service orientation already available in the IT environment to be a full profit to the internal and external organizations which in itself also should become more and more service oriented. As stated before, we are living in the service environment in itself. So I think to even leverage the abilities of a service oriented IT even more is to introduce that also in the total setup of business because new ideas are not only supported by new IT facilities but also by an agility in the business itself to operate it. Chris, if I could add to that, there is a UDDI question posted on the panel as well. Let me just add to that that at the practice level, let's say in an enterprise like AMEX that leverages SOA with business capabilities expressed as services and registered in the enterprise service registry and repository. We can more easily leverage these services in implementing new business ideas shorter time, higher quality, all the good things lower cost. So before we actually embark on developing the capabilities needed for a new business idea the service registry and repository is searched for available services which can be leveraged in the development of the new or enhanced products. Chris, may I quickly just add something on that point? So it's the idea of implementing a new business idea using SOA. So basically a new business idea or a business idea is usually a composite. That composite can leverage the existing business capabilities that we have in our service portfolio that is aligned between business and IT and that composer, that composition can occur and that new business idea therefore gets developed in new products and services that is in need of development. So how is that different from enterprises that don't have SOA? Well, they don't have a set of business aligned services that are in the catalog or the portfolio of services that can be exposed and composed together to create these new innovative or just new compositions that provide these new products and services. The critical thing is the management of that portfolio and the governance of that portfolio of services which is between business and IT, two in a box, they work together which is tough in many organizations because you have to break down some organizational barriers and cultural issues where business and IT have to come together. But the answer is how is it different from an enterprise that doesn't use SOA? They will find it increasingly difficult and if not altogether impossible to expose their capabilities beyond the organization in ways that other companies can compose and therefore new business solutions and implementation of new business ideas becomes extremely restricted if not infeasible. So back to you, Chris. That's an interesting point, Ali. So what you're saying there is not only is SOA enabling the implementation of new business ideas, it's actually enabling new ideas to emerge because there is the possibility of one company using services exposed by another company. Could I ask you all to just comment very briefly then on this question of the relation of SOA helping enterprises realize the potential of new technologies such as cloud computing, social, mobile computing we've already heard mentioned, big data analysis, the internet and things and so on. Can you just say a few words on how SOA can help enterprise realize the potential of new technologies. Sundar, if you can hear, you missed out on the last question. Can you start us off on this one? Can you hear me? Yes, I can. So just in terms of emerging technologies, the way of organizing and orientation towards having service get lost for many of the backend services that we talked about, the check in a bank or some retail point of sale system. Now it allows for leveraging the service that's developed across multiple channels like the spot phones on the tablet as well as rendering it through the social channels as well. And reach a mass consumer base using cloud services rendition of the same services. So this allows for not only the efficiency in creating those services and quickly the orchestration of the services across multiple applications that can reach the end users and your customers and partners in a very nimble manner which has not been talked before in the client server arena that we've alluded to. And in terms of agility, it also provides a good platform for developers to now have higher productivity instead of just writing component integrations. So the services are just used in a plug-and-play mode across multiple ways of delivering the application to the end users and partners. Okay, thanks Sundar. Gerald, do you have anything quickly to add to that? Yeah, again, just to stress the idea. I think organizations are confronted with new technologies and that can create new business ideas. And I think the stress is that an organization should not have a separate IT function but that more IT knowledge should also be available within the management of business development because actually new ideas is about business development and having such an holistic service orientation also from a business perspective in which you have business services defined with implicitly related to the IT services with functional requirements but also with aspects like security, flexibility, and availability, confidentiality from a business perspective makes it easier to separate certain parts of a business that can be outsourced in the cloud and also defines boundaries and restrictions to it and also enables putting up SLAs and so on. So I think that having that all in mind even improves the outsourcing and using all the new ideas and possibilities. So I think sufficient IT knowledge and perception at a management level where business development takes place is also pre-requisite. Okay, thanks Gerard. I know not everyone has spoken on this but unless Ali or Shah, you can't get back from saying let's move on to the next question because we are getting short of time and that is the question of role as a business technologist. I can give a concrete example on that that would definitely help illuminate that. When we have the SOAR services in place, for example in the digital payment space, AMEX initially launched a Pay With Points capability that was for online, for the web channel. We had developed the SOAR services to enable that. Now with the mobile becoming a prime platform, we actually leveraged those same capabilities that people could pay for their taxi rides in New York City, Pay With Points and then extended that to pay with your Pay With Points in Uber cars as well. So this is an example when you have those SOAR services in place, it becomes much easier to realize the potential of new technology. Okay, so that's a good concrete example of SOA enabling new technologies. Do you have any comments on essentially how that plays out within the business and technical departments? Would you have that implemented within an IT department or with a business area using business technologists? How would you see the way these new business capabilities being implemented within AMEX? Well, I would say with AMEX, ongoing focus on innovation and agility and of course recognizing the impact that technology can have on driving increased business and customer value, that traditional business technology divide is really more, I would say, of a legacy at AMEX. We actually have been adopting a rather product orientation and delivery approach as opposed to the traditional project approach and in this model, the product owners, which are made of a combination of business and technology people, they actually act as business technologists. They identify new user stories, they maintain the product, backlog and so forth and ensuring that existing SOAR services are leveraged and also to introduce new services, it's actually an essential facet of that product ownership. So you're talking about combined business and technology product teams? Yes. Okay, which is a very different emphasis. Ali, how do you see this playing out? Do you see a business technology role emerging or maybe as Sharis describing, teams combining a business and technology capability? Yes, I would definitely agree with that. The business technologist is a rare creature and either they are becoming rapidly extinct due to the ozone layer disappearing, which I'm saying tongue in cheek, but realistically, we want to have two in a box. So the business analyst and the IT architect would be working together from the very beginning of the development life cycle or the evolution life cycle. Initially, the business analyst would be prime and collaborating with the IT architect and then gradually they, as the project gradually moves into more of a detailed design kind of phase. Even if you're doing successive agile iterations, you need to do some of that upfront activity and the combination, the two in a box paradigm of the business analyst and the IT architect is critical to the success of any development program, especially SOA. What SOA does is essentially we're trying to mine out business capabilities that the business has locked up in their heads and the IT capabilities that is locked within the IT systems and try to map and mix and match them together essentially. Lots of M's going on here, but basically pulling out both of those, trying to map them together and build a portfolio of services and dependencies between services based on that. Critical to that is the collaboration between business and IT and business and IT will not collaborate with one another unless the individuals start collaborating with one another in a two in a box fashion and management intervenes and designates the fact that from a governance perspective and from a project methodology perspective, they need to have these roles working together in order to succeed and in fact, the first question that was raised, the ROI question, in order to maximize or even achieve return on investment, you need to have the collaboration between these two parties and if we don't, to the extent to which we have it, the organization is more mature, let's say on the OSIM scale and to the extent that they don't have it, the organization is going to be less mature. Okay. I have a very short addition to this, if I may, Gerard. I think it's even more than collaboration between business and IT. I think really there should be more and more responsibility on business side over the IT facilities. So I think it would be even more that there is more direct management of certain IT facilities, critical to business agility on the direct management of the so-called business management. So I think it's even more than just collaboration. I think it should be a shift of certain IT facilities and the management of IT facilities into that operational organization. And that would in itself be more a role than mentioned here as a business technologist, but I think it should be a more general maturing of IT use. And I'd like to add on to that too. This is Marty Chris. It's just, you know, when Gerard talked about earlier of really reorganizing the business as well around those service-oriented principles, it then gives you that ability to have more of a business technologist, someone that's understanding just that business capability, or business service, really, instead of just the whole entire capability, right? Because now we have a lot of generalists in a lot of ways, but if you have someone that understands that area, understands a bit into the technology and really understands the business, you can start to get that, you know, two-in-a-box in one person. You know, it's difficult, but when you reorganize your business around those principles, then that becomes possible. I think that's one of the places where SOA, you know, if you read the original SOA books and you look at them, you know, they talk about being a cultural shift in a way of actually re-looking at your business, and then that should drive change into your IT. It ended up being, I think probably because of having architecture in the name, it became this IT initiative, you know, of a silver bullet. And as much flexibility as you build in the back end, if you don't have those plugs into each of those different business services and business capabilities and understand what you need to start making those changes at the business level, you really, you know, you really handcuff yourself. So in order to kind of open that up, once you start to organize your business around your services, then you can maybe create more, you know, instead of them going extinct, we might be able to bring back a business technologist because of the way that you've structured your business. Okay. And just to supplement what Marty was saying, we also noticed, you know, business architects, you know, stepping up to the, you know, two in a box becoming one person with the subject matter expertise from related industries like automotive retail and so on. So, Chris, are you inviting controversy or would you like us to keep this completely amicable? No, no, controversy is good. I'm just sort of aware of the fact that there are some good questions coming in from the audience as well. But let's pursue this thread. If you have something controversial to put forward, then let's hear that point. And I hope also that all of the panelists are looking at the huge number of questions that are coming in on the chat and you can see a whole range of things. Governance, for example, relation to enterprise architecture, portfolios, metrics coming up in the questions that are being asked. So if in your answers you can build on some of those interesting points, that would be good too. But go on, Ali. Well, what I was going to suggest was, you know, the idea of a single person having both these capabilities is a rarity and there are these individuals. I know a number of them. But the critical thing I think that we're missing here is the political nature of the discussion. We tend to think, we technologists or some of us who are technologists tend to think, even if we're on the business side, we think if it's myopically on that side, we tend to forget the fact that the politics of the equation are critical to our success here. The idea of having one person, no matter what side they're on, you cannot have them represent, technically you can have them represent the business and IT subject matter expertise. But from a political and organizational perspective, you need representation. And that representation needs to collaborate overtly within a governance framework at an enterprise level, ideally for more mature organizations and for less mature organizations, they're going to start out at the project level. And they're not going to have official governance. They're going to have kind of a bootstrapping governance capability. But the key thing is that there are representatives sitting at the table from both sides of the equation, from the IT side of the equation and the business subject matter expertise. I do agree, however, that you can't have generalists. I mean, yes, you can have generalists at a steering committee level. But the business analysts and the IT architect that we're talking about are very specific subject matter experts in specific areas of detailed, let's say, consumer retail and connected car or whatever. And they will drive the discussion of business capabilities and develop the business portfolio of capabilities with the IT person. So I think it's more of an organizational challenge, change management discussion, and a political discussion. That's why I think we need to have the two-in-a-box concept. Although the idea of developing the business technologist as an elite group is a noble endeavor. Okay. So that brought out a very good point then, Ali. And in fact, I suggest as time is moving on, and that is really something of a crucial point and also governance is a point that's come out in a lot of the audience questions. Can I ask the other panelists to comment on, given that you have a, and perhaps, Shah, you could lead us off with this, given that you have a combined business and technology team working on a product basis, how is that organized from a governance perspective? How do you agree on what should be developed as services and govern the architecture development? So ensuring that services are proposed and introduced as part of these capturing the repeatable business activities is an essential part of that exercise. And I would say in the digital economy these days, it would be rare that we talk to a business person that does not think of the digital economy. I mean, if you think of everything we do, apply for a loan, a credit card, pay, and so forth has been digitized so heavily that it's kind of not having a digital mindset would be an odd thing, in a sense. So for enabling SOA, it's critical that as those user stories are sorted out, prioritized, and so forth, and then they are looked at for taking those to the product level, we look at those capabilities that are needed for those scenarios and think of, is this a repeatable business activity that can be proposed and developed as a service? So I would say that needs to become an inherent part of the agile and product ownership exercise. Okay, so the definition of a service is a crucial aspect and the governance processes must enable this. Marty Sundar, Gerard, would any of you like to add to this? Of course, as he pointed out now, especially the initial stages of service definition and then not repeating service proliferation, creating the same service over and over again for different purposes. These are all things that need to be well governed in terms of service initiation during the portfolio stage itself. So it kind of helps both in our business and IT proliferation and also some of the business technology and architects that we see in some of the industries, they're getting added, especially in the connected vehicle and other places, they are added to the, as part of the extended business team, especially doing agile approach and agile methodology in terms of software development practice. So I think that's a very good thing in terms of bringing governance to the forefront so that things are managed much before they are even continued during the development and deployment stages. And a good example that Sarah was talking about was leveraging the same service from a web frontend to the other devices, the tablets and phones, as well as other, it may also morph into microservices in terms of lots of other devices and sensors that are coming into the play in utility in other industries as well. Okay, so microservices will be the topic for another webinar. I'd like actually because we have only a little time left to wrap up with a final question, can I ask each of you to give us 30 seconds on what the future should look like? How should so evolve for the future to help enterprises deliver greater business value? Ali, would you like to give us 30 seconds on this? Yes, I think the critical thing there is that there are trends going on, mobile, API management, cloud software services, et cetera. We need to make sure that we align ourselves with these trends and recognize, this is the key thing, we need to recognize that many, if not most of these trends, are evolution and extensions of SOA. So what does that mean? It means that the best practices we've been developing in the SOA world should be leveraged when we do API management, when we build mobile applications, when we go to cloud. And I think that is the critical success factor in leveraging the foundation of best practices as we move into these new technologies. Okay, so SOA is a secure, is a good foundation. Gerard, do you have anything to add on that? Yes, definitely. I think I stated before, organizations should use service orientation throughout the shaping of the organization. And it should, in that sense, become part of the DNA of an entire organization and not only of the currently more separated IT departments. I think, and here, we can definitely leverage the experience that we gained in IT on service orientation. But I think it would be a mistake to think that applying service orientation only in an IT context in separate IT departments will allow us to fully provide that additional business value that is expected. So, yeah, so I can only stress the importance of evolving and using a more holistic view on service orientation to be a full profit in this sense. Okay, thanks Gerard. Sundar, do you have anything on this topic? Yeah, Chris, you know, just on the foundational aspects of the best practices from SOA, it's also a journey in an enterprise that's evolving to be, you know, into the digital economy in the world to basically having enterprise digital services, you know, across all segments and all markets, you know, just not only in marketing and other length of business, overall enterprise services in terms of the digital visualization that's happening around many of the industries. Okay. Shah, do you have a crystal ball that can forecast how SOA should evolve? I wish. But a couple of areas that I would like to highlight, APIs are now a critical area for an enterprise because it can actually enable potential growth and added business value. So I would say evolving SOA to deliver and utilize APIs in an agile manner is a prime area of enhancement for SOA. Also, the second one that I can think of, SOA enablement of new technologies such as, you know, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service. I'd say, for example, OpenShift, OpenStack, you know, I would say that's another prime area for evolving SOA. For the non-technical areas, you know, definitely I would say introduction of an industry, a standard training and certification. SOA training and certification is definitely still an area for SOA evolution. Okay. That's some good thoughts there. And Marty, can I ask you to have the final word on this? Yeah, I think that we, you know, do need to understand that, you know, SOA has really helped the IT landscape change, right? We really need to evolve and drive into the business more than we have, I think, in the past. You know, that whole idea of service orientation in the business, allowing a business capability to, you know, a business area to actually just go out and get software as a service and go completely around the IT department, right? That's going to happen more and more as more and more things get, you know, set up out in the cloud and out there in general. So I think that we really need to be aware of that, aware that the IT landscape is changing, that business has, you know, more control over that, you know, going forward. And, you know, we should embrace that and bring, as Gerard said, all of the wealth of, you know, the wealth of experiences that we've learned over service orientation over the past, you know, 10, 15 years to the business. Okay. So I think that's a great thought to end on. And I'd like to thank Shah, Marty, Sundar, Gerard, and Ali for their thoughts, sharing those with us in some excellent answers to questions and discussions. And I'd like to thank everybody who participated. Thank you all for your attention and we hope to see you at the next webinar. Thank you very much.