In this Q&A with GRIDtoday, Infravio's vice president of standards technology and marketing, Miko Matsumura, discusses the SOA market, Infravio's place in the SOA market and the relationship between Grid computing and SOA. In addition, Matsumura previews his upcoming presentation at InfoWorld's sold-out SOA Executive Forum.

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GRIDtoday: First, can you tell me a little about Infravio and your position  with the company?

MIKO MATSUMURA: Infravio is a pure-play SOA company building SOA Governance capabilities around a registry repository. I am both the VP of technology standards, as well as the VP of marketing.

Gt: In your opinion, what is it about Infravio that makes it a unique company?

MATSUMURA: Infravio uses the tagline “The SOA Governance Company,” and it is unique in both it's capacity and position in the market to focus exclusively  on this problem. I refer to its capacity in that Infravio has had a large development team in Chennai, India, and the company has been attacking the SOA space and Web Services before that since its inception in 1999.

Gt: Standards are a hot topic in the Grid computing world. How important are they in the world of SOA? On what types of standards do you tend to focus?

MATSUMURA: Standards are key to functioning for SOA and SOA Governance. We  focus on standards such as the WS-I Basic Profile of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. Beyond that, a set of standards such as WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-PolicyAttachment, ebXML, JAXR and WSRP are central to our product. Of course, our product is  built on top of standards such as Java J2EE, LDAP, and the basic Internet standards.

Gt: Speaking of Grid computing, how familiar are you with the technology? How would you describe the relationship — if there is one — between SOA (and  other service-oriented technologies) and Grid technologies?

MATSUMURA: Grid is a powerful enabling technology for SOA. SOA is about resuable, flexible, dynamic, declarative models for information technology.  One of the key functions that can slow down business agility is the capacity provisioning and planning aspects of service delivery. If services can be deployed on a large-scale grid of low-cost devices, this enables a more  dynamic model for provisioning resources where services can be arbitrarily scaled out when needed.

Gt: Based on your experiences, where do you think SOA is in terms of ubiquity  in the enterprise? Is it still an emerging technology, or has it reached a level of acceptance where it is just assumed users are adopting it?

MATSUMURA: Surprisingly, SOA is reaching the mainstream. Infravio is seeing early majority adopters in mainstream industries such as freight  transportation, entertainment, media and other such areas. As with many technology waves, the earliest adopters were in financial services and telecommunications. We also have seen a significant amount of adoption in the government, health care and insurance sectors.

Gt: In general, what is it that has made SOA such a popular choice for leading companies over the last few years?

MATSUMURA: SOA starts without having to throw away any existing  infrastructure. It then goes on to provide a powerful answer to internal system integration, then to application and service delivery, then to the core transactional services for the company. So, SOA provides an evolutionary path from solving smaller problems of reuse and integration all the way to the point where a company uses software interfaces to provide business services. This is like  the revolution of Software as a Service (SaaS), only bigger.

So, SOA has the excellent property of creating a clear path from where IT is today all the way to a future state where it embodies the strategic core of  the business, including policies, processes, services and total visibility of business performance.

Gt: Where do you see service-oriented technologies heading over the next few years? What kind of evolution will we see as SOA and its related technologies continue to evolve?

MATSUMURA: Earlier, I said that SOA will be bigger than Software as a Service (SaaS). I say it's bigger because using software interfaces to provide  business services includes things like selling books (Amazon.com) or plane tickets (Kayak.com). It can include business services like phone and digital services (webservices.sprint.com). Just about any transactional service can be offered through software service interfaces over a broad network. Software as a  Service is just one business (the software business) offering its solutions. In the SOA future, all significant companies will offer their Business as a Service (BaaS).

Gt: You'll be presenting at the upcoming SOA Executive Forum. What will that presentation cover?

MATSUMURA: I will be talking about the role of standards and open source in  SOA. This will cover the dramatic changes to the software industry through the customer driven requirements for transparency and the resulting decrease in  the ability for the largest platform vendors to hold sway over their customers.

Gt: Yours aside, are there any presentations or sessions you're especially looking forward to at the SOA Executive Forum?

MATSUMURA: Yes, I am looking forward to hearing about the SOA Governance panel, as Phil Windley (InfoWorld) did a favorable product review of Infravio X- Registry and Ed Vazquez (Sprint) is a customer of Infravio. So there should be a lot of great information about SOA Governance available in that session.

About Miko Matsumura

Miko is responsible for Infravio's marketing operations and strategic planning. He also leads Infravio's open source and standards strategies. He is founder and chair of the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee and a co-founder of the Apache Synapse project. Previously, he was vice president of product marketing at Systinet Corp. Matsumura was chief Java evangelist for Sun Microsystems, where he was part of the early team responsible for Java. Before Sun, Matsumura worked at Wired Digital and the Well online community. Matsumura is currently a limited partner with Focus Ventures and was an advisor to the Asia Java Venture Fund, as well as start-ups TogetherSoft, Dejima and Kendara. Matsumura holds an MBA from San Francisco State University and a Masters Degree in neuroscience from Yale University.