KATHMANDU, NEPAL: Rapid changing business environments require agility. That opens up the avenue for smart SOA for business transformation, said Kalpana Margabandhu, director, WebSphere Development, IBM, India Software Lab. She was speaking on the topic, 'Smart SOA for Business Transformation', at the ongoing C-Change 2009.

"With SOA, you are extracting services from different applications. There could be services created from different applications as well," she added.

Initiatives mapped to SOA entry points depend on what are your current needs. These can be oriented by people, process, information, etc.

Vendors are expanding beyond their core solutions to play across areas inorder to offer a full BPM suite. With IBM, you have products that are well integrated. In the current requirement, BPM is also enabled by SOA in the context of people.

Evolving need for new types of applications: User centric, process oriented, flexible, collaborative, context driven, dynamic, and information rich. Need for role based integrated platform where information could be coming from different services.

She cited two examples, the first being Tata Sky. In Tata Sky's case, DTH is really transforming. It wanted 1 million customers on-board within a year. The way a customer can renew the account is very simple. He/she can come in through multiple ways -- IVR, SMS, etc. There is an account recharge process (voucher).

Another example is of Reliance Life Insurance, who wanted a single view of the customer portal. The company made use of SOA to achieve faster time-to-market.

She also cited Gartner, which says: "Don't postpone SOA. Reprioritize your SOA roadmap."