COMMENTARY--With all the new buzzwords, products, technologies, and standards that come out in the IT world, it is hard to keep straight what is tried and true versus what is just the latest hype. Well there is one important acronym that should not get lost in translation--SOA or service-oriented architecture.
To understand SOA is to understand the problems that all businesses face. We are not working in a perfectly isolated, homogeneous bubble. In this globally connected economy there is no control over who you deal with and how. It is becoming increasingly essential to break down borders and co-exist, while maintaining individual business differentiation. As an analogy, consider the principles behind the European Union (EU), which fosters co-operation across 15 to 25 countries while preserving their diversity and independence.
So what is an SOA and why is it becoming a critical component? The simple translation of an SOA is the notion of common business processes available in a central repository for use and reuse, all within a secure and well-managed environment. SOA provides an enterprise with the flexibility to take elements of business processes within the underlying IT infrastructure and reuse them to address changing business priorities. Don’t solve the same problem again and again. This goes beyond the notion of reusable components at the code level, such as Enterprise JavaBeans, but instead refers to reusable processes at the business level. Therefore alignment between IT and new business initiatives now becomes strengthened, more strategic and cost effective.
Gartner predicts that by 2008, more than 60 percent of enterprises will use SOA as the "guiding principle" when creating mission-critical applications and processes. That being said, it is important to realize that SOA isn’t a new concept to the IT industry; it is just one that will be taking on a new life and a new direction. I attribute this to the popularity and gradual adoption of Web services – an industry standard for how the SOA repository should look, for how the reusable business processes should look and describe themselves and for how communication should happen. A major benefit is that there are no dependencies for how the services are implemented or what technology is being used. Plus after a service is deployed and becomes available for reuse, it is also tested, predictable and documented, driving down development costs.
You no longer have silos of architectures unique to an organization or department, but instead have made the architecture open yet secure…breaking down borders. The ability to build new applications that serve business processes and data across the organization and also extend their reach to a disparate array of customers, partners and suppliers provides for a tremendous advantage over competitors and is becoming more and more critical to the success of an organization.
The architecture allows for reusability and extensibility. It also allows for a better team development methodology with a division of labor between your back-end developers and front-end developers, using the repository as their common ground. These two groups are no longer dependent upon each other so functionality can be demonstrated to business sponsors as it gets implemented keeping the project in line with expectations. Infrastructure issues such as security are applied at the level of the common architecture, enabling IT teams to turn their focus back to addressing the business requirements. Finally, the punch line by having reusability and more effective team development is that you succeed in driving down maintenance costs.
If you want to adopt and implement an SOA you will need the technology in place. Here are some of my recommendations for choosing the technology.
Tools:
Web services is a well defined standard with a set of descriptive languages. I recommend selecting productivity tools for your developers that already support Web services and SOA, which means that they automatically generate the descriptive languages and provide you with a compliant repository. These exist as open source as well, but lean toward the vendors that contribute to the standards rather than your unknowns.
Infrastructure:
Make sure your server foundation is scalable, secure and adaptable for changes in business and technology. Most of you have already selected a J2EE foundation layer, but if you haven’t, consider carefully. This is the foundation to all of your business and needs to be able to grow with you. Some of the largest and most trusted vendors are IBM, BEA, Oracle and HP. According to Gartner, IBM is the most popular and leading choice for application servers, integration servers and portal servers. BEA typically does well in the application server space, but lately there is less reassurance about their long term viability with the drop in their marketshare, and continued speculation as an acquisition target. Oracle, a solid database vendor, but not best of breed for the application/IT infrastructure. Finally, we often see HP playing catch-up.
With SOA IT is now tightly integrated with business objectives, customers are more satisfied, projects can be delivered faster and cheaper, costs can be reduced, and applications can be extended out to partners and customers.
biography
Tony Webb is a key member of Prolifics, a worldwide provider of Enterprise Business Solutions to Fortune 2000 companies around the globe. Tony has over 25 years of expertise in the IT industry conducted high-level business analysis, requirements development, detailed design, development of high-end database applications and web-based applications and building architectures for mission-critical systems.
