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SOA, going beyond Web services

SOA is helping change the way business solutions are delivered by providing closer, impactful alignment between business objectives, processes and IT systems. By Vinita Gupta

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an emerging trend in the enterprise software space. Within the industry circles, it is known to be one of the most effective ways to overcome IT complexities at businesses that need to be flexible and adapt to dynamic market conditions. Nasscom as well as market researchers believe that SOA as a contemporary IT trend will yield great benefits in the future.

IDC predicts that the market for SOA, including software, services and hardware, will reach $21 billion by 2007 and according to Springboard Research the Indian SOA market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49 percent from 2006-2009, making it the fastest growing market in the region.

SOA extends Web services

Web services are suitable components for implementing a SOA. In essence, Web services are self-describing and modular applications that expose business logic as services that are published, discovered, and invoked over the Internet.

An SOA, on the other hand, is neither a technology nor a product, but an architectural approach. SOA extends Web services capabilities by guiding the creation of structures of services, while benefiting from the open standards model that Web services provide.

“Web services and their related standards do not, in and of themselves, solve some of the important challenges of SOA like the management of services and other infrastructure that are required to support services. Therefore, while Web services can be an important technological component of SOA, Web services are not SOA. Companies are moving beyond Web services to adopt SOA,” says Akshay Aggarwal, Head- Systems Engineering, BEA Systems Technology.

“While implementing Web services is a definite step towards the adoption of SOA, enterprises need to develop an effective governance structure for managing their Web services environment to foster reuse and adoption of standards,” believes Arnab Ghosh, CTO, Torry Harris Business Solutions (THBS).

According to R. Dhamodaran, Director, SWG, IBM India, “SOA is not about technology. You cannot buy a SOA, you have to do it. It’s a style of architecture underpinned by key skills, ecosystem, industry know how, and infrastructure. You need to think of it as a shift in the way you architect your IT environment.”

Fuel for the SOA rocket

An SOA approach better aligns IT with business goals and enables IT organisations to re-use assets, deliver value, faster, to the business, and support ongoing requirements for change. A CIO is faced with challenges such as enhancing business value from existing IT infrastructure, TCO and ROI on IT infrastructure. That is why business agility is a prime driver of SOA deployment. Mergers and acquisitions will also accelerate SOA adoption in India.

James R. Smith Jnr, VP and GM, Customer Service Applications Division, Avaya Global Connect, believes, the reason that SOA is being discussed in every boardroom is that it has the potential to increase the agility of an enterprise’s operations by improving the ability of IT departments to respond to changing market and business needs.

“The pace of the business in India is moving faster than ever before. With customers, partners, and employees expecting higher-quality service—twenty four hours a day, seven days a week—it’s a challenge for enterprises to cater to this need. Hence, an SOA approach can be extremely effective, as it helps an enterprise improve operational efficiency, customer responsiveness and business agility,” believes Aggarwal.

According to Akila Krishnakumar, CEO, SunGard Offshore Services, India, no industry can resist change. So when change comes knocking, re-writing applications from scratch is not an option. What is needed is a carefully calibrated SOA adoption path that factors in reuse of existing IT assets.

In India, the manufacturing, banking and telecom are likely to adopt SOA in a big way. Apart from this the thrust on e-governance will also help advance the case for SOA in India. Gartner estimates that more than 60% of enterprises will use SOA as a guiding principle when creating mission critical platforms by 2008.

“Indian companies have one of the highest awareness levels in the region of SOA and its benefits. However, despite a much higher awareness of SOA in India, the number of companies planning to deploy SOA is less than that in China where the awareness is much lower,” said Ravi Shekhar Pandey, Senior Analyst at Springboard Research. 

He adds, “It is not surprising that India’s pools of IT literate professionals understand the latest technologies in the market such as SOA. Often however, their efforts to implement new technologies are held back by management teams less familiar with the latest technologies or how they can boost business results.”

Indian system integrators providing offshore services and local ISVs have also been quick to include SOA in their business plans. IT service providers like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Ramco Systems, Satyam, HCL Technologies, Polaris Software, Cognizant Technologies, and Patni Computers besides a host of other small and mid-sized firms are building SOA capabilities. A number of ISVs are working with leading SOA platform vendors to add SOA capabilities to their applications, and many are developing new applications based on SOA frameworks. 

Barriers to growth

Lack of awareness and familiarity with SOA is the number one barrier to SOA adoption. Many Indian enterprises are still not aware of SOA and over and above this even among companies that are aware of the concept, there are concerns about implementing SOA. In order to be successful, an enterprise must take an iterative approach to implementing SOA.

Aggarwal believes, the iterations should be based on opportunities to realise benefits as quickly as possible, and in the process to develop the processes, approaches, practices and infrastructure necessary to deliver services to the enterprise and to govern delivery of the same. Because of the change required in the way IT delivers functionality, attempts at large-scale initial adoption of SOA have failed. He adds, “It is crucial to keep in mind an eventual goal of transforming an enterprise to SOA, but one must move toward that transformation in an incremental, iterative fashion.”

“CIOs have to ensure that business requirements come ahead of technology, its limitations and its possibilities,” adds Krishnakumar. Effective education provided to enterprises in this area can assist them in the decision-making process.

Throughout 2007, TIBCO will conduct a series of seminars to bring users of TIBCO’s software face to face with their product experts. “With all the hype around SOA, it’s helpful to see the technology, talk with product experts, and hear from customers who are using TIBCO’s software for SOA deployments. That’s the purpose of the Bus Stop Tour,” says Rourke McNamara, Manager, Product Marketing, SOA, TIBCO.

Relating SOA to BPM

Business Process Management (BPM) is growing in popularity and it complements SOA due to its ability to help make business processes more efficient and effective while enabling an organisation to adapt to changing business requirements. BPM based on SOA is technology’s response to the growing demand for a flexible business environment unhindered by application silos.

According to Dhamodaran of IBM, when business processes are automated and streamlined and supported by a strong SOA governance framework, BPM can deliver on its promise of transforming IT processes to dynamically adapt to business needs. For these reasons, BPM is being widely embraced.

He adds, “The powerful combination of BPM to streamline business processes within an SOA strategy will help companies position themselves as industry leaders while ensuring that they are poised for continued success.”

BPM involves multiple systems and people from various departments communicating with each other using a predefined process path. It can be effective only if the systems that are part of the process have the necessary service enabled interfaces that can be called at various points or nodes of the process. “The ideal scenario will be if the entire organisation is service enabled and BPM just needs to call all the services without needing to write even a single line of code to achieve 100 percent automation. Hence, its efficiency is directly related to the SOA enablement of an organisation,” says Aggarwal.

Ghosh of THBS believes both BPM and SOA are complimentary to one another. SOA brings about an agile IT architecture which when combined with BPM, enables easier and quicker composition of business services.

McNamara adds, “The evolution of BPM, SOA and business optimisation technologies is accompanied by a corresponding rise in the complexity of the processes that they manage. Hence the assistance of a tool with visualisation and other features such as simulation and activity-based costing is essential to optimise business processes and realise BPM cost and time savings.”

Strategic partnerships

Some strategic partnerships are happening in this area. Aggarwal, Head- Systems Engineering, BEA says, “Indian customers will prefer partnerships where they can get a combination of industry leading technologies with world-class expertise to help them accelerate adoption of SOA within their enterprises in order to realise new revenue streams or drive down SG&A expenses.”

According to Ghosh of TBHS, such kinds of tie-ups are positive steps which will aid in the wider adoption of SOA within businesses. He adds, “Indian customers will prefer IT service organisations to give them vendor-neutral choices with respect to what combination of products can be used for implementing SOA. This would help them to take informed decisions on this aspect.”

To be successful, SOA requires strong governance, manageability and planning; however, the requirement is often beyond the processes and skills of organisations.