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Integration and the SOA story

Business applications drive technology, and Service Oriented Architecture is no exception. Vinutha V says that by using Web services, SOA is giving enterprises the opportunity to integrate business processes and applications.

A bank is thinking of offering a customer a credit card because it is a way to grow and enhance revenues. But it has to be able to decide quickly whether to do so or not, and determine what the credit limit should be. Interaction with customers through a Web site or a call centre is of a short duration, so this process has to be executed quickly. Before the bank offers a card, they will want to look at pieces of information about the customer including his credit rating, past purchase history, how profitable the purchased items are, and more. Gathering and processing all these pieces of information quickly is a big challenge because they are all stored in different sources, databases and formats, some inside the company, others outside.

One way to make all these systems talk was to spend lots of time and money hoping to get these silos of information to speak the same language. A faster, cheaper and more effective way to do it is through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

To put it simply, SOA has become an approach to IT that enables business flexibility by making software assets available as re-usable services. Organisations must find a way to transform these tightly-integrated business engines into the flexible, re-usable building blocks of future systems. Re-usability is the key to increasing productivity and flexibility while reducing total cost of ownership. Organisations that wish to enable business change must find a cost-effective blueprint to evolve existing architectures towards greater flexibility across heterogeneous landscapes.

Enabling application integration

SOA uses open standards to make a company’s business operations more efficient, effective and collaborative. Industry standard software (Web services) connects data in an SOA regardless of what platform or application the data is in. This allows the entire infrastructure to be broken down into basic building blocks that can be mixed or combined to execute a specific business process. With business processes supported by an SOA foundation, a company can make its previously siloed data and software applications inter-operable across business units, as well as with third parties. This approach leverages existing resources to help improve productivity.

Taking on Enterprise Application Integration

In the mid-1990s, similar constraints gave rise to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), which attempted to stitch together business scenarios using specific application-to- application (A2A) interfaces designed for performance and reliability. But EAI has not produced an integration architecture that is cost-effective in the long run, and it has had its own problems. More recently, Web services have held out great promise, but their true power is yet to be tapped.

The desire to make IT more flexible is not new. Indeed, it is as old as the IT industry itself. Organisations have used numerous approaches in attempting to solve their integration problems. “Traditional approaches have significant disadvantages including the use of restrictive proprietary methodologies, tight coupling and rigorous data models. These prevent them from addressing integration challenges in a timely and cost-effective manner,” comments R Dhamodaran, Country Executive, Software Group, IBM India.

SOA avoids these. Specific advantages include simplified data aggregation, lower costs through use of standards such as Web Services and XML, quick response to constantly changing business requirements without impacting data accessibility, better distributed IT environments through an intelligent link between business needs and technology, and an incremental return on investment.

"Traditional approaches have had significant disadvantages including the use of restrictive proprietary methodologies, tight coupling and rigorous data models" - R Dhamodaran Country Executive Software Group IBM India	"The complexity of design in IT departments is growing. Companies are spending 80 percent of resources to maintain existing applications" - Dhruv Singhal Head Professional Services BEA Systems

Curbing IT complexity

“The complexity of design in IT departments is growing. Companies are spending 80 percent of their resources to maintain existing applications. The time required to build on new applications is long,” notes Dhruv Singhal, Head, Professional Services, BEA Systems. They are facing challenges in introducing new facilities and applications. An agile organisation must support the new generation of business requirements in an increasingly heterogeneous systems landscape. Today’s environments are dominated by a mix of packaged enterprise suites, best-of-breed applications, and legacy systems. To complicate matters, many large companies have gone through multiple acquisitions and divestments, leaving their IT infrastructure in a web of different stand-alone systems carried over from these business changes. As a result, implementing even simple business processes means cobbling together processes spanning different organisational units, different systems, or even different external service providers. Integrating heterogeneous systems remains a key challenge for IT departments. To tie disparate systems together in a single, point-to-point integration project is costly and results in an increasingly rigid IT environment. To reduce complexity and cost, businesses need a single platform that integrates people, information and business processes.

As the marketplace globalises, new markets, a new workforce and new competitors are making companies look for ways to adapt more quickly. We see the cycle time shrinking between changes in business processes. Over time, the cost of maintaining and adapting these processes can increase exponentially as business structure and customer needs change. Says Simon Dale, Vice-president, Business Development, Business Process Platform, xApps Analytics, SAP Asia-Pacific: “Managing IT is becoming increasingly complex. For enterprises, the need to step ahead of competition is driving the demand for a simpler architecture which can enable integration of business processes and applications.” The services layer provides abstraction from back office systems, eliminating the need for each development team to understand how to communicate with back office systems. The effort to understand the back office system is estimated to be anywhere between 30 to 50 percent of a development cycle.

Promising future for SOA

Many companies have benefited from SOA, but they haven’t taken a systematic approach to implement the technology across their enterprises. This results in under-utilisation of technology and lower potential benefits. To get the full benefit of SOA, companies also need better visibility into their business processes, adds Dhamodaran.

According to IDC (May 2004), the market for SOA— including software, services and hardware—is expected to reach $21 billion by 2007. Projects are expected to increase in complexity, size and duration. Gartner predicts that by 2008 more than 60 percent of enterprises will use SOA as the ‘guiding principle’ for IT infrastructures that support critical applications and processes.

vinutha@expresscomputeronline.com