Archives: News

With the new year comes a new look and feel for our website. We have restructured our web presence to improve the user experience.
First of all, we added a section where we introduce SOAPARK as more than just a 0815-consulting company and underline we are the best fit for your digital initiative.

Furthermore, we added a section where we will present engaging video content to give you a better understanding of the challenges we are facing in the day-to-day business and share our recent experiences from our digitization projects. So, stay tuned!

In addition, we provide downloads of valuable insights like publications, case studies, checklists and much more to help you drive your digital journey.

Last but not least, now you can dive into our latest news or take a journey through our past.

The Digital Cookbook addresses the most important questions of what may be the greatest upheaval for society and the economy in this century: “What exactly is digitization?”, “Why is the topic so important?”, “What is required for a successful digital transformation?” and above all “How exactly can this be implemented efficiently?”. These questions are answered in the Digital Cookbook with the help of articles and exciting case studies by over 60 pioneers and high-ranking decision-makers in the digital economy.

For this reason, MID, IPT and Salesforce brought together some of the most influential members of the digitization scene and authors of the Digital Cookbook for a professional exchange.

After a short introduction by the organizers, the evening offered ample opportunities to exchange ideas with the authors over food and drinks and to expand the personal and professional network.

When? Thursday, March 8th, 2018 – from 6 p.m.

Where? Smith and de Luma – Grubenstrasse 27, 8045 Zurich

Published in November 2017, this book addresses the needs of executives, senior managers, project managers and decision makers, who will or already have embarked on a digitalization initiative.

The main authors and over 50 guest authors provide the context and best practices for such initiatives from a variety of industries, businesses and viewpoints, strategic, functional, operational, technical and executional. We do not focus on a specific industry, but lay out general, abstracted characteristics of digitalization. The book is structured into four parts:

1. Why it is Important to Become Digital Right Now: The authors elaborate first, how digital empowers a new way of thinking in businesses. As a core effect of digitalization, enterprises gain robustness allowing them to better deal with a variety of complex challenges. Enterprises are forced to act in order to meet the immense competitive pressure.

2. What is a Digital Enterprise: The transformatory power of digitalization revolutionizes the way in which business is executed. A large variety of new business models appears. In addition to the opportunities arising for individual enterprises, new ecosystems of businesses evolve.

3. How to Become a Digital Enterprise: Digitalization requires nothing less than a comprehensive transformation of the business model. From the outset, the digitalization initiative must be launched and governed from the top due to its all-encompassing impact on the enterprise. The digital transformation is then getting shaped strategically.

4. How to Execute the Digital Transformation: Once the new digital business model is defined, the digital transformation is driven forward in various dimensions directing the relevant governance tools. We show specific areas of focus in finally executing such transformation initiatives.

Available on Amazon

After the huge success of the Digital Cookbook the authors created a tool that can be used in the day-to-day work on a digital transformation  program. This Digital Canvas underlines the cookbook character of the book, providing you with an essence of the best practice approaches the authors have experienced, implemented and developed in their respective contexts. It is structured into the following sections:

1. Launching and Governing the Digital Transformation with the areas of action: “Take Decision”, “Enable Leadership”, “Mobilise”

2. Shaping the Digital Transformation with the areas of action: “Define Vision”, “Shape Target Enterprise Architecture”, “Define Transformation Plan”

3. Driving the Digital Transformation with the areas of action: “Inspire”, “Enable Organisation”, “Transform Portfolio”

4. Executing the Digital Transformation with the areas of action: “Project Methodology”, “Data, Analytics and Insights”, “Digital Trust”

It is the year 2017 and three IT pioneers follow the call for the urgent need of  a digital transformation compendium. From the depth of change management, a project arose….

For more details visit: https://digital-cookbook.com/

At EIC 2016 Dirk Krafzig speaks about Identity Federation which has become an essential business need to modernize IT landscapes. The focus to achieving Identity Federation often revolves around product solutions that attempt to solve identity federation with agents, adapters, and rip-and-replace environment disruption.

The session demonstrated how to achieve identity federation in a landscape of existing IdM systems, repositories, directory services, and other user information stores by unifying these capabilities via a federation services architecture tier. It shows how an enterprise can architect a federation solution to expose standard-based identity capabilities while leveraging existing architecture to reduce cost, and to reduce the burden of actual implementation and deployment.

Dr. Dirk Krafzig gives a lecture on digitization at the Insight 2016. The contribution: “Digital Transformation at the Interface Between Strategy and Execution” precedes the basic idea that the implementation of a digital strategy causes great challenges for CIO organizations. On the one hand it is necessary to obtain a complete picture of the pre-digital landscape and the desired target architecture in order to establish a serious and sustainable planning. On the other hand, this planning must occur without compromising the required quality at blistering speed.

He presents a methodology which unites speed and sustainability in the planning of the digital transformation. The starting point is the modelling of the digital business model and the resulting services which are successively broken down into IT functions. The methodology allows the participation of a wide range of stakeholders in the modelling process including the executives in the business, users, analysts, the CIO, and IT architects.

Dr. Dirk Krafzig from SOAPARK, Mamoon Yunus and Jason Macy from Forum Systems joined together in  holding the workshop: “The Foundations of API Security and API Gateway Technology”. This workshop explores API gateway technology:

• Implementation of a modern and secure infrastructure
• Use of API Gateway technology to achieve business agility and information security
• Modernization of legacy and existing services
• Centralization of identity management (including SAML and OAuth)
• Modern access control strategies

Dr. Dirk Krafzig is attending the SOA / BPM Integration Days in Munich to offer a workshop dealing with the subject of “SOA-Security”. In cooperation with the CEO of Crosscheck Networks, Mamoon Yunus, Dr. Dirk Krafzig is analyzing the numerous dangers for enterprise networks that are related to the progressing trends of BYOD-guidelines and Cloud Computing. The intention of the workshop is to present tools for setting up an effective strategy of SOA-Security based on the industry standards.

Dirk Krafzig presents at DAMA conference in Stockholm: The ideas behind SOA are still relevant and now growing again! Dirk Krafzig is one of few experts that understood early on the reusability based on the assignment of entities to data-centric services. This has a major impact on the resulting applications described in his book “Enterprise SOA”. The picture shows Dirk Krafzig and Eskil Swende. Eskil is the host of the DAMA conference and partner at IRM, a Swedish provider of consulting services in the field of Enterprise Architecture.

For more details visit: http://www.irm.se/eatr40

Mamoon Yunus from Crosscheck Networks and Dr. Dirk Krafzig from SOAPARK explain in their presentation “SOA Security Overview” the basics of SOA security such as service virtualization, confidentiality and integrity as well as access controls. These techniques are the basis for a truly trustworthy Enterprise SOA.

Dr. Dirk Krafzig from SOAPARK and Mamoon Yunus from Crosscheck Networks held a Power Workshop on the subject “SOA Security Hands-on” at the SOA | BPM Integration Days 2012 in Munich. The increasing SOA-fication of traditional application landscapes inspires two contradictory tendencies in companies, namely the opening of internal systems to access by external applications on the one hand and the closing of the same applications for the protection of critical business data on the other. Simple integration mechanisms which effortlessly incorporate security considerations are therefore decisive for the success of an Enterprise SOA initiative in practice. In the “SOA Security Hands-on” workshop, participants learn SOA security principles, common industry standards and practical application scenarios.

Markus Mazur from SOAPARK held an extended Power Workshop at the second SOA | BPM Integration Days in autumn 2011 with a focus on service modeling. As at the beginning of a design process many people who prefer informal presentation forms are involved, this must also be reflected in the process. It must also be considered that modelling in a formal notation like UML, BPMN or WSDL includes a certain degree of precision that cannot be achieved at an early stage of the design process. The modelling of alternative scenarios, rejections and improvements etc. must follow quickly and simply and be immediately understandable for all participants.

As a result, the design process of a SOA proceeds in two stages: an informal (paper and PowerPoint) and a formal (UML, BPMN and WSDL) phase. The right moment for the changeover from the informal to the formal design must be found based on the concrete organisation. The “SOA Modelling” workshop considers these aspects and provides the participant with a consistent methodology that is tested in numerous exercises during the workshop.

In December 2010 Markus Mazur and Oliver Mahnke delivered a SOA Modelling seminar in Frankfurt. The seminar which was aimed at analysts and IT architects included the correct tailoring of the services and the modelling of the service contracts. In many individual and group exercises the participants had the possibility to translate technical examples into concrete designs.

SOAPARK has successfully completed the first German seminar from Thomas Erl’s SOASchool.com curriculum in Hamburg. For an entire week, the numerous international participants worked on the modules of the “Certified SOA Architect” course and learned to apply the acquired knowledge in a wide range of case studies.

Both the participants and the instructors, Dr. Dirk Krafzig and Markus Mazur, had a lot of fun and learned a lot.