30 Minute Interview

SOA and the Indian CIO

Sunil Mehra, Director - Sales, Fusion Middleware, Oracle, talks about Service Oriented Architecture and its importance in India

Service oriented architecture for CIOs

Businesses today are forced to respond faster to competition and customer challenges and are looking at IT as a differentiator providing flexibility and speed as they address complex business issues. IT managers are looking at technology foundations that provide both agility and reduced cost. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) helps businesses respond quickly and cost-effectively to meet these changing market conditions.

SOA in India

Awareness of SOA is increasing. 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 of 49 percent during 2006-2009 making it the fastest growing market in the region. Industry-specific solutions will be a major driver of corporate IT spending in 2006 and beyond. Also many companies in India are following the inorganic path of growth, and SOA can help in Mergers and Acquisition (M&A) by bridging the gap.

Need for SOA in the FSI segment

The industry is seeing a lot of traction for SOA across all verticals including FSI, telecom and government, both in India and abroad. The institutionalization of SOA in financial services industries and the public sector has reaped positive results. In the case of the insurance sector, SOA is the key provider of customer service through the simplification of business interfaces and effective service-level tracking, thereby facilitating tracking of key performance indicators. Hence there is huge momentum in the FSI segment. For instance, if banks want to implement new functionality in their core banking systems then, with the help of the SOA, they can do it easily.

SOA and traditional middleware

SOA has evolved from traditional middleware. Middleware is still a part of SOA as it is far advanced (the J2EE engine) and functional in the Internet and portal domain.

Oracle’s solution

Customers have infrastructure on certain technologies, some vendors provide bundles of products that require replacement but we at Oracle provide want customers want with minimum replacement. We provide the fram ework, the J2EE engine on the SOA standard (or convert the application to SOA) that can help a company to go in for a SOA implementation. We also provide tools to manage SOA.

Our standards-based family of middleware products, Oracle Fusion Middleware, enables customers to adopt and manage SOA in heterogeneous computing environments. Oracle’s customers include organizations in the financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, pharmaceuticals, health care and public sector industries. Oracle Fusion Middleware is supported by 9,000 partners, including ISVs, value added resellers and system integrators.