Beyond business benefits

Public-sector organizations such as public utilities or transportation can use SOA to improve customer service by linking front- and back-end business processes to enable real-time online operations.

Financial services providers can use SOA to streamline processes such as loan approvals by creating a single secure view of multiple relevant information components — such as the applicant’s credit standing, the bank’s existing loan volume, and current money rates.

Hospitals and clinics can use SOA to create secure information-delivery architecture for the exchange of sensitive medical information. With an SOA, IT can integrate data and identity management features for protecting confidential data and exposing shared services only to authorized users.

SOA opens up a whole new world of possibilities for real-world success.

The next phase of SOA

We've come reasonably far with SOA creating requisite awareness and mind share. However our current approach to SOA needs to be more mature in various terms. For example, we need to improve the clarity and completeness of the various web services standards and, when they become available, we have to ensure that this more complete, mature, coherent set of standards is broadly adopted.

We also need to be constantly aware of the need to standardize the format and semantics of the data that we send and receive over SOA. We need to be just as clear as to the process semantics that surround and govern each of the exchanges as we are of those that make up SOA-based composite applications.

Finally, we should not overlook the challenge of connecting composite applications with all of the small and very small enterprises that don't have the technical capability to implement web services stacks, data transformation programs, orchestration solutions, and all of the other technologies that generally go into building an enterprise-class SOA infrastructure.

How do we address issues like this? While there are approaches that are entirely valid for fixing each of these problems individually, we need a Web services intermediary of some kind to fix all four.

SOA intermediaries

One solution would be for the IT department, on its own, to develop solutions to each of these issues. A better alternative, at least for a fairly large portion of the SOA world, may well be the use of a third-party "SOA intermediary."

This idea of an independent intermediary that enables integration across organizational boundaries is not new. In the B2B world, we have had EDI Value Added Networks (VANs) for more than two decades. Despite many of the Web-based alternatives that are available these VANs are still widely used as they provide important capabilities to companies both large and small.

A VAN can act as a trusted third party to enable secure, reliable communications between business partners. This includes certifying the identity of each trading partner and logging each interaction between partners in order to provide non-repudiation for both sender and receiver. It can define and enforce a set of canonical standards for data format and semantics and process semantics. A VAN can also enable the development and certify the implementation of the interfaces built by each participant on the network. It can on-board smaller participants by allowing smaller enterprises to connect by typing data into a Web form or by e-mailing in documents and then VAN can convert this data into valid B2B messages.

All of these services that have been historically provided by VANs to enable EDI-based communications can be similarly provided by "SOA intermediaries" to enable more modern B2B connectivity.

SOA intermediaries can also provide additional value-added technical services and commercial services. For example, SOA intermediaries can:

·Convert EDI messages to Web services calls and responses. Implement version control so that each service consumer only connects to a valid version of the service provider.

·Provide commercial enablement services like letters of credit, customs clearance or bill presentment, and payment processing.

·Support reverse auctions between suppliers and manufacturers.

·Enable cost-effective service matching between suppliers and transport and logistics companies.