Why SOA Intermediaries?

While there are plenty of tools in the market that enable the development, deployment, management, and maintenance of SOA connectivity, these tools are not appropriate or they are not sufficient for some enterprises. First, there are many companies that are too small to effectively enable their own B2B SOA connections; i.e., either their IT departments are too small to allow them to build and maintain the necessary skills or their budgets for SOA connectivity are too small to justify the investment.

Second, there are issues related to the standards that we rely on to enable SOA connectivity, and these issues occur because of the lack of complete, stable, non-ambiguous, broadly adopted SOA enablement standards. Finally, there are capabilities that are simply best provided by third parties.

For example, in an era where data logs can easily be modified and providing the providence of such files is subject to much guesswork and insinuation, it's critical to have a trusted third party log all transactions so as to provide non-repudiation of sender and receiver, i.e., I can prove that you received the message that I sent and you can prove that I sent the message that you received.

Given all of that, is an SOA intermediary a good idea for everyone? Not necessarily. There will always be enterprises that want to do things themselves. But, in an age when anything and everything seems to be subject to outsourcing, there is every reason to believe that there are many enterprises that would welcome the opportunity to outsource the technical and commercial issues related to using SOA capabilities to deploy composite applications that link an enterprise with its business partners.

In the present corporate world, SOA has become a critical component offering potential for lower integration costs and greater flexibility. Gartner has predicted that by 2008, SOA would be a prevailing software engineering practice, ending the 40-year domination of monolithic software architecture. It is important for more and more organisations to understand the advantages of SOA, presenting a huge opportunity for business growth and competitiveness and acknowledge it as the next wave of web services.

Ashish Banerjee, Chief Software Technologist, Sun Microsystems India