Flashline's Charles Stack on the 'three Rs' of SOA

Flashline CEO Charles Stack said that SOA's value proposition centers around the 'three Rs' of SOA -- and he wasn't talking about 'registry/repository.'

In my last post, I discussed BEA's recent announcement regarding plans to acquire repository vendor Flashline, along with comments on the registry/repository dynamic from BEA's Paul Patrick.

I also had the opportunity to talk with Charles Stack, who urges enterprises that may be mired in the implementation details of SOA to keep an eye on the big picture as well. "Over the last couple of weeks, as we put the [BEA and Flashline deal] companies together, one of things that we explored is a top-down perspective -- why are Flashline and BEA customers are doing service oriented architecture in the first place?  It’s to increase agility and save money."

Here, Stack identifies the three Rs: reuse, reduction, and remix benefits. "Customers save money, they reduce the amount of unnecessary duplication. And they enable, almost for the first time, the ability to remix the IT functionality into new configurations as business demands require, and things change."

Hence the requirement for registry and repository to help organizations better understand what SOA assets and artifacts they have available. "That may sound simple, but you go into organization after organization, and they don’t know what they have, whether it’s a WSDL file, a schema file, a BPEL file, or all those myriad XML files that contain metadata and relationships strewn all around the enterprise." Placing those assets into a repository, "finally enables organizations to enjoy the benefits that SOA promises," he says.