Looking to SOA for better results

Indian organizations have realized that 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. By Nivedan Prakash

There’s an upsurge of interest in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the Indian market as well as a fundamental commitment to SOA as the future of process and application design. It is seen as a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align IT with business goals resulting in greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity.

As the adoption of SOA grows, organizations using this standards-based framework for delivering information recognize the need to deliver integrated operational information to their systems and business processes. This helps ensure that accurate and complete information is used throughout the business while making it possible to deliver new information in real-time.

If we go by market reports, Indian companies have one of the highest levels of awareness regarding SOA and its benefits in the Asia-Pacific region. Today, it has become a strategic and vital component of any management decision as it helps integrate business processes, address real time responsiveness and handle transactional complexities.

It is believed that many enterprises are familiar with the term and its definition but are still in limbo over how to approach and implement SOA. Typically, organizations struggle with the option of whether or not they should take a ‘total makeover’ approach in implementing SOA wherein they would be rewriting their applications to be modular or leveraging a platform that can utilize their preexisting resources while implementing SOA in the process.

Ravindra Ranade, Head – Presales and Global Professional Services, Red Hat India, said, “Research reports are not indicative of the current level of awareness of SOA in India or the Asian market as compared to other regions. Nevertheless, there has been a significant rise in interest in SOA and the potential of the same. This has been largely driven by system integrators who compete with each other, and look for SOA implementations to be projected as a relevant and elegant solution proposition to a customer’s needs.”

Looking at SOA deployment

Having moved from the planning and piloting stages to a new and encouraging phase, SOA deployments are a reality today. Companies like Intelligroup have deployed SOA- based solutions at technology, CPG, and media companies. The company’s SOA solutions have increased sales and improved business processes.

“It’s no secret that in any industry, you require innovation and flexibility in order to gain a competitive advantage. However, what’s changing the landscape of today’s industries is the alignment of IT with business goals. This fusion has led to the proliferation of SOA to help reduce costs and lost revenue attributable to redundant functions and duplicated efforts. Realizing the benefits of reuse and maximizing productivity is encouraging more deployment of SOA-based architectural frameworks within companies,” opined Vivek S Rawat, Country Manager – WebSphere, Software Group, IBM India.

The need for implementing a SOA-based architecture has certainly been felt across businesses. However, to derive the benefits of and implement the same, there are aspects beyond just technology and hence beyond a CIO’s control.

The aspects of data governance and the security implications of data being shared across business applications need to be taken into consideration when data travels from one department or business to another. Hence, a successful SOA implementation requires the involvement, understanding and consensus of the complete business which is often a challenge to achieve.

Chris Nguyen, SOA Product Marketing Manager, Tibco Software, said, “Globally, many organizations are in the deployment phase. Several larger enterprises within India, realizing the possible gains from SOA, have taken comprehensive steps towards modernizing their IT infrastructure in this direction. As more use cases begin to appear, the transition phase between planning or piloting will quickly segue to the phase of deployment among smaller and medium-sized businesses as well.”

Some industry experts are of the view that SOA is no longer looked upon as experimental on the technology front. Almost everybody agrees that SOA implementations are more challenging than common implementations that have been happening.

The emphasis on reference architectures, awareness of various integration options, availability of mature open source SOA components and grooming of SOA experts, who can mentor, give hope that there will be a number of successful SOA implementations involving business analysts, architects, developers and other stakeholders. Initially, there had been a big gap in the understanding of this technology by stakeholders. That is why the industry is seeing more cases of graduation to the deployment stage.

Growth of SOA in the Indian market

Although, SOA is believed to be still evolving, most businesses are showing a growing interest in this technology model. According to Gartner estimates, by 2010, at least 65% of large enterprises will have more than 35% of their application portfolios based on SOA, up from fewer than 5% of organizations in 2005.

Another report from Springboard Research estimates that the SOA market in India would have grown at a CAGR of 49% from 2006-2009, making it one of the fastest growing markets in the APAC region.

“One fundamental change that we are seeing driving the SOA market is the move to incremental process optimization and application integration based SOA vs. the Big Bang SOA approach. While SOA is all about services behind the firewall, we are also seeing organizations start looking at how they can leverage services across the firewall. Besides, the introduction of new service consumption types can offer many benefits, but standalone SaaS offerings that don’t integrate with existing infrastructure and systems quickly becomes unwieldy and typically do not bring results for the business,” asserted Pallavi Kathuria, Director - Server Business Group, Microsoft India.

Some of the other driving factors are that SOA helps accelerate business execution, reduces time-to-market and assists in gaining higher margins on existing IT investments. Service virtualization along with understanding the business benefits such as scalability, flexibility and agility for the business will also be the building blocks of demand for SOA.

Besides, the ability to respond to business changes rapidly, the need to control the cascading effect of business changes on various systems, the need to adopt mature and relevant technologies (workflow tools, rules-based management, various Web frameworks, etc.), and need to integrate heterogeneous systems in a standard manner will drive the adoption of SOA in the Indian market.

Dhruv Singhal, Senior Director – Fusion Middleware Sales Consulting, Oracle India, pointed out, “Today, the primary driver for SOA adoption is the business demand that forces enterprise data centers to deliver more with minimal resources. SOA adopts open standards to reduce integration costs, provide composite applications, reduce custom coding through configuration and enable self-sufficiency for the end user. It is expected to be a critical business enabler rather than a mere IT tool.”

Meanwhile, SOA adoption within India has been primarily seen within telecommunications, banking and financial services organizations due to the recent economic slowdown. However as the need to innovate intensifies and companies are forced to deliver new products faster and quickly react to changing business requirements, there will be an apparent increase in the sense of urgency for mainstream SOA adoption.

The other verticals that have adopted SOA largely include the manufacturing sector, media companies, retail, automobile, aviation, ITeS, insurance, healthcare, government and public sector, and oil and gas as well as mining and metals.

The limiting factors

Some of the issues like control and ownership of shared services and bureaucratic opposition to process reengineering are acting as a hindrance to the deployment of SOA. Apparently, one of the biggest hurdles to SOA is a clear understanding and awareness by the marketplace of the technology framework and its benefits.

“The handicapping factors include the management being unwilling to spend even reasonable sums of money on SOA infrastructure products and good SOA developers as well as the lack of SOA architects and talent across the board both in companies and in the system integrator community,” said Atul Saini, CEO and CTO, Fiorano Software.

Moreover, the challenge is also around delivering ROI and this can be overcome by anchoring SOA to business process optimization. The other challenge faced is managing services metadata. SOA-based environments can include many services which exchange messages to perform tasks. Depending on the design, a single application may generate millions of messages. Managing and providing information on how services interact is a complicated task. Many vendors are working on offerings to address this particular challenge with a sectorial point of view.

Another challenge is providing appropriate levels of security. Applications which consume services, particularly those external to company firewalls are more visible to external parties than traditional monolithic proprietary applications. The flexibility and reach of SOA can compromise security. As SOA specifications are constantly being expanded, updated and refined, there is a shortage of skilled people to work on SOA-based systems, including the integration of services.

Significant benefits

Given the current scenario, there is a definite need for the Indian organizations to understand the significant benefits that can be delivered through SOA with regard to delivering new business services. Unless an organization’s management fully understands the benefits, together with the underlying investments involved both for innovative SOA products and for talented engineers, the benefits of SOA will not be realized by Indian companies.

A SOA implementation should be carefully planned and mapped to the organizational needs and goals rather than aping open benchmarks. Over engineering (trying to grab minute details) should be avoided as it leads to complexity, chaos and increased maintenance. The deployment should be incremental and should start in a phase-wise manner rather than going all out in one go.

Liladhar Bagad, Global SOA and BPM Leader, Intelligroup, said, “Understanding the business benefits will help drive the adoption of SOA. The fundamental change is to collaborate with more business partners and the best way to enable that model will be leveraging SOA to integrate underlying business services. Also, there is a significant advantage in consolidating your application landscape and separating a common process layer to drive your shared service model for supporting the business.”

Indian companies must also understand that there are direct benefits of SOA but they are gradual in nature and become visible once the architecture stabilizes in an organization.

Additionally, Indian companies need to understand that the adoption of SOA is more of a business decision, rather than a technological one; look at SOA adoption as a means to achieve business process optimization by making processes more agile and scalable; adoption of open standards ensures that the customer retains control of future implementation strategy and avoids vendor lock-in; and SOA implementations provide significant cost and operational benefits in the long run.

Of late, organizations are increasingly looking to adopt SOA technology for assistance in managing regulatory compliance, business process integration, real time responsiveness and transactional complexities. SOA can enable organizations to transform their IT infrastructure to stay ahead of the competition without having to start over.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com