Is Vietnam Ready for SOA?

Least we push ourselves to the limits of marketing hype and business reality, there will be quite a few out there who really wonder how prudent, realistic is the push for SOA in the emerging markets, say for example East Asia, or ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). ASEAN is comprised of 10 member nations, specifically Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myannmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam. Many in the U.S. would scoff at the GNP of any one of these at the country level, but trust me, it is a misnomer to call some of these countries "emerging" markets. In many cases, for example in manufacturing, China is their only rival, with the U.S. losing out many years ago.

With the exception of Singapore, this region does have some challenges which earns it the "emerging" classifier, a book can be written about it, but primarily the key concerns from a social/economic perspective which can inhibit growth are the communication issues associated with the multitude of languages, population explosion, inadequate city infrastructure, and the horrendous pollution within the cities. Issues associated with non-transparent governments run a close second but can be managed. Like I said, another book.

So with these sort of issues, how can a country such as beautiful Vietnam, which is at the bottom of most lists which rate countries by education, poverty, disease, infrastructure, etc., how can it even think about solutions and technologies that are really geared towards societies which are far more mature in their ability to build IT infrastructure?

To that, during my 05-Dec-2007 trip to Hanoi, I was reading in the local Hanoi press how Vietnam was only now looking at agriculture solutions which employed mechanization. It is hard for the country to not leverage the agriculture industry's low cost labor as a means to drive most agriculture output. But the article correctly notes, the government and the citizens are better off achieving higher productivity via mechanization, with an added benefit of being able to redeploy freed up laborers into other sectors such as manufacturing.

So for Vietnam, business automation, for example through SOA, has the same parallel. A business model could use traditional means and deploy a plethora of cheap technical resources and build, build, build the rats nest of inflexible solutions, just like the U.S. did in the 60's through the 90's. Or, it can chose to use fewer technicians and leverage the newest of infrastructure technologies such as is offered by IBM, but along with the appropriate architectures, to arrive at business solutions which promise to make Vietnam immediately more competitive in IT areas which today bog down businesses and governments in all other countries. Ah, the wonderful opportunities which can begot with a green field space, if only the vision is there within Vietnamese IT and business leadership to capitalize.

My audience was not leadership however, as I was there to transfer knowledge to technicians on many different IBM SOA products and topics including architecture and modeling. So, in one week we reviewed the full life cycle SOA product line of WebSphere Modeler, Process Server (WPS), Registry and Repository (WSRR), and Monitor. To do this type of work without modeling is similar to putting up a building without a blueprint, so we inserted Rational Software Architect (RSA) as it is fully UML 2.0 compliant and it comes with a SOA for RUP Profile. SOA governance is facilitated with Tivoli for service management, and project life cycle management with the Rational products.

It was challenging, as most of my audience had NOT heard of EAI, RUP, UML, modeling in general, OMG, service management, project life cycle management, governance, work flow, long running transactions, asynchronous communication, etc. They HAVE heard of SOA, but today they do the classic things like write code, and persist data to databases. Web Services are akin to agriculture mechanization, we are so early in the game for Vietnam it can actually make front page news just discussing the subject. But far from implementing.

But now is the time for knowledge transfer, the trip was not wasted. I challenged my students, build for your country and government something which is long lasting, resilient, robust, something you will be proud of. Oh and of course, use IBM. All of this said, remember the aforementioned language issues for the region? Well, I speak English, they had limited skills with my native tongue, but they spoke perfect Vietnamese, and I none. So the region's communication issues left its mark again.