SOA  Insights

Service Oriented Architecture enables innovation in business by ensuring that IT companies can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs.  The SOA wave is growing and companies from varied fields and of different sizes are riding it to reduce their costs and improve efficiency. Many software solution providers are making hay while the SOA sun is still shining. Gartner states that the worldwide market opportunity for SOA, including software and services, will continue to grow through 2008 when it is expected to reach billion.  But what customers need now is an SOA vendor with strong products. Features like a standardized programming model a sound Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) are favored.  Ultimately, customers want SOA products that will not deflate or bring the company crashing down.

How is SOA evolving ?

SOA is a long-term IT strategy designed to -

1. Break down monolithic applications into discrete, self-describing business functions called ‘services’
2. Leverage standards to improve service interoperability
3. Enable reuse of services that can be assembled into ‘composite’ applications to quickly satisfy new business requirements

It’s also important to note that SOA is not a single set of products, technologies or standards, since SOA spans technological and organizational boundaries.  Hence, success requires leveraging a best-of-breed approach to ensure the right technology satisfies a particular task.

SOA is not a new concept since it takes its lessons from previous iterations of component-based develop (ie : CORBA) to enable an unprecedented level of asset reuse.   SOA has moved into the mainstream in recent years, driven mostly by the maturation of Web services and other related standards.

What makes SOA such a sought-after approach in enterprise business ?

Today companies are struggling to keep pace with the rate of constant change driven by the dynamics of their respective industries (one recent survey indicates that only 11% of executives say they're able to keep up with the business demands to change technology-enabled processes).   Executives who are trying to stay ahead of their competition -- say by bringing to market some new product or service,  or executing on a new marketing campaign designed to improve customer satisfaction, for example -- are often times frustrated with the fact they must wait (sometimes as long as 10-12 months) for their IT department to put into place the processes needed to support the new business initiative.

The primary benefit of SOA is to shorten time to market by accelerating the application development/deployment cycle through the reuse of existing IT assets instead of having to write, test and deploy new code.   Customers have found that SOA is accelerating their time to market by as much as 40 to 60%,  and in some cases as much as 75%.  This means that what use to take 10-12 months to deploy the processes needed to support that new business initiative can now be done within a month or two.   This has a profound impact on the ability of the business to capitalize on new market opportunities faster.   By contrast,  without SOA it can represent a tremendous opportunity cost given the loss of potential revenue over the course of the additional 8-9 months needed to develop new applications from scratch.    Further,  with a focused project,  results can be achieved within hours or days.   Obviously this is a major competitive advantage for the business.

What are the issues in the SOA area that still need resolving ?

Because SOA is much more of an application development paradigm than any set of products or technologies, it represents a way of doing things.  Hence, the reasons for failure to successfully deploy an SOA most often are tied to the human factor.   A number of organizations have cited the fact that even once they put into place the infrastructure needed to deploy and SOA, the extent of service reuse they immediately achieved was minimal.  Often times with an enterprise SOA initiative it took more than a year before they started to see tangible benefits from reuse - which was the result of gaining a level of trust with their Developers.   After all, developers instinctively want to write code when building out some new business process.  Great effort must be made to educate Developers to first look for services they can reuse before writing code.

How will advances with Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) influence or augment the growth of SOA ?

SCA as a key standard in the design and assembly of services within an SOA.   The logical design model of SCA will be coupled with a physical deployment model such as JBI (JSR208) to enable the next generation of composite applications that span multiple implementation technologies.

What are the issues organizations of different sizes must consider before opting for an SOA solution ?

Are there any supplementary services a customer must look out for ?

The major benefits of SOA are realized when SOA is extended across the enterprise, and service reuse can be achieved beyond departmental boundaries.   For this reason, all platform groups need to be included with an SOA initiative.  Further,  the Architecture team needs to establish guidelines / standards across various departments / platforms with a focus on having best practices to better ensure project success and high value to the business by leveraging all information in the enterprise.

In addition to software, services are almost always needed to help Customers define and execute their SOA strategy.  These services often include planning an SOA / integration approach, designing a reference architecture, identifying organizational issues, implementation and testing, etc.  Because the scope can be broad is why organizations have a preference for focused projects that deliver results fairly quickly  (ie: in hours or days) and then extend the project to other areas of the business.  This evolutionary strategy also reduces risk and cost to move systems forward.   

How important is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in a company’s SOA infrastructure ? 

Is an ESB built on open standards more effective/efficient ?

An ESB plays a critical role in an SOA.  However, the concept of an ESB is nothing new, nor is it enough.  When you look at the functional components of an ESB—transport, routing, transformation, orchestration, mediation, etc.—these are the same functional components of what a traditional integration broker was designed to do even before Web services standards had emerged.  Newer integration technology uses open standards.  But as previously stated, the true benefits of SOA are realized when SOA is extended beyond departmental boundaries.

What are the top five questions a customer must ask a vendor before choosing an SOA solution ?

Typical questions include –

1. How will the SOA technology help address the heterogeneity that comes from running disparate application platforms ?

       (Ie :  different vendors’ J2EE implementations, .NET, C/C++, mainframe, etc.)  

    How will SOA help extend reuse of these services across different platforms ?
2. Beyond support for Web services (ie: SOAP, WSDL, HTTP) - how will an SOA solution help wrap and expose all information as reusable services?
3. Which transport mechanisms and protocols does the solution help scale an SOA implementation for the distributed enterprise ?
4. How does the SOA solution support services governance and security?
5. Beyond the product features, does the vendor have extensive domain and integration / interfacing knowledge to better assure a successful implementation ?

How important is the OpenAjax initiative to improve Eclipse ATF and Ajax interoperability ?

Very important since a solid AJAX solution enables the delivering of applications that look, feel and perform like desktop GUIs.   This also provides organizations the ability to leverage components from open source and other 3rd party products.

Standards help create a 3rd party ecosystem around the core infrastructure much in the way that the JSR-168 portlet standard has done.   In conjunction with this,  it helps to work with a supplier who is very knowledgeable with integration to make disparate things work together.

What is the scope for the adoption of SOA infrastructure,  the market drivers and the growth potential for SOA ?

Any medium to large enterprise must deal with issues such as the rising cost of IT and the inability to meet the rapidly changing demands of the business.   To be pro-active at addressing these issues,  organizations are implementing SOA solutions.    In fact many of the largest companies in the world manage their mission-critical systems and either have deployed, or are in the midst of executing, an SOA initiative.  Besides improved IT efficiency and greater adaptability, typical drivers for SOA include the ability to resolve significant business issues such as corporate and regulatory compliance.

 What are the latest trends in the SOA area ?     What is the expected road map for SOA development ?

A typical SOA application will be implemented across many development technologies including process definitions based on WSBPEL, existing J2EE and .NET components, services residing in packaged applications and new services built in Axis-Java environments.   In addition,  scripting environments which provide rapid development capabilities will start to see a resurgence as mechanisms for developing services.   The combination of SCA and JBI will provide a powerful standardized environment that spans the complete lifecycle of services (across design and execution) within the SOA environment.

Oct. 22, 2006      …. edited article from SOA Magazine