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30 Minute Interview
The coming age of SOA
The approach that BEA Systems is taking to the Indian market
is influenced greatly by the growth of SOA. Steve Au Yeung, Senior Vice-President,
APAC, BEA Systems discussed the potential of SOA for India Inc. with Faiz
Askari.
Steve Au Yeung |
SOA in India
SOA has a huge potential in the Indian Market. NASSCOM has come out with a report
that firmly establishes SOA as a contemporary IT trend that will yield great
benefits in the future. India is set to be the fastest growing SOA market in
Asia (according to Springboard Research) and it is expected to grow at a compound
annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49% from 2006-2009. The research also mentions
that Indian companies have one of the highest awareness levels of SOA and its
benefits in the region.
Who’s adopting it
In India the emerging enterprise, manufacturing and telecom segments are likely
to adopt SOA in a big way. Apart from that, the thrust on e-governance will
also advance the SOA market in India. The following are the factors that will
accelerate its rate of adoption amongst enterprises:
- Competition will force enterprises to adopt SOA
in order to be more agile and responsive.
- The increasing cost of maintaining and integrating
applications.
- IT budgets will also force IT departments to look
for greater efficiency in building and maintaining applications.
- Widely adopted standards for service interfaces,
registry,service invocation, etc. will also help.
Beyond Web Services
SOA is, by definition, an architecture, and not a technology.
Web Services are an important set of standards that allow services to be defined
and executed in a way that is both technology and vendor agnostic. However,
many other technologies may be used to define services. Additionally, Web Services
and their related standards do not, in and of themselves, solve some of the
important challenges of SOA such as the management of services and other infrastructure
to support services. In fact, merely encapsulating functionality with Web Services,
without any other change in an enterprise, creates an additional layer of indirection
and associated overhead solely to gain a measure of platform independence, and
leaves in place the many-to-many style of integration that is making change
difficult in most large enterprises. Therefore, while Web Services can be an
important technological component of SOA, Web Services are not SOA in and of
themselves, therefore the companies are moving beyond Web Services towards adopting
SOA.
Top priorities for customers
Customers have realized the fact the SOA is not just a concept but a reality
and that it can help them build a more agile and service oriented enterprise
for the future. They have started to service enable their existing applications
so that the existing systems can be utilized to their maximum capacity to be
made available as a business or data service for all new initiatives and applications.
SOA [does not happen overnight] and organizations where IT is critical have
to get onto the SOA bandwagon before it’s too late.
The CIO and CXO level have understood the benefits and need
for a SOA enabled organization and hence it’s coming as a mandate to all
the project owners to incorporate SOA and SOA-based technology for all their
future application and project development. Moreover, SOA is not something that
is meant for a particular project only. SOA is a new way of doing things and
has to be incorporated in an organization’s culture.
The price of SOA
The initial cost of SOA is high due to a couple of reasons.
First, the organizations have to service enable existing or new business functions
and processes which typically cost 50% more than creating it for one time use.
Moreover, in order to be successful, there is a greater need for SOA governance
along with project execution. Hence, the true benefits of SOA starts to reap
in when there are 10-20 reusable services and all the new applications start
to use those services without investing any time on it.
Tie-ups
BEA has tied up with Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd. to develop Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA) solutions based on the BEA AquaLogic and WebLogic platforms.
Under this expanded partnership, TCS’ Practice Areas and Centers of Excellence
agreed to create new solutions based on BEA products. TCS’ Global Consulting
Practice also agreed to also work closely with BEA teams on joint SOA consulting
assignments to help accelerate SOA adoption and deployment. BEA Systems and
TCS have a successful history of working together to deliver solutions for the
financial services industry, and are working to bring new SOA solutions to market.
BEA’s offerings
SOA is an approach to enterprise computing and can be achieved successfully
by deploying/addressing the issue at hand in a step-by-step manner. Designing
the platform as a collection of open frameworks that share a common runtime
environment, common programming model and common management infrastructure,
provides an enterprise with a complete and unified set of capabilities. It is
about identifying the nature of the service required rather than the tool itself.
In case of BEA, the WebLogic platform still continues to an extremely reliable
product base. However, keeping in mind the emerging business needs, BEA has
also recently come up with its AquaLogic platform of products, aimed at improving
overall business responsiveness.
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