Cloud-computing: A trend to watch in the coming future

Interview

Cloud-computing: A trend to watch in the future

Sreenivas Jasti, Director - SAP Practice and Sandeep Sabarwal, Director - Oracle Practice, from Fujitsu Consulting talk on SOA, Cloud-computing and the trends that are coming up in these areas

Rahul Sah

Friday, November 21, 2008

BANGALORE, INDIA: Fujitsu Consulting is an information technology and consulting firm that delivers innovative IT solutions and services to several Fortune 500 companies globally. Rahul Sah from PCQuest had this opportunity to interact with Sreenivas Jasti, Director – SAP Practice and Sandeep Sabarwal, Director – Oracle Practice, from Fujitsu Consulting on the Service Oriented Architecture and the trends that are coming up in this area. Also they talked about the cloud-computing aspect and how this is going to be a trend to watch in the coming future.Some excerpts from the conversation:

PCQuest : The early adopters of SOA have shown the benefits of SOA for seamless business. Now, what new trends you see coming in the SOA field?
Fujitsu : With now SOA being adopted widely in the industry as reliable and efficient technology for integrating heterogeneous systems the there is even more demand in the market is for pre-implemented, customizable packs which can be easily plugged in to integrative systems. This saves the customer from getting into complex development of integration components, and it significantly reduces the time, cost and risk associated with implementing SOA projects. Oracle has recently introduced the AIA (Application Integration Architecture) which provides the basis for developing PIP (Pre-Implemented Packs).

Oracle’s recent acquisition of BEA is going to be another major area to be looked upto. BEA’s robust Application Server products combined with Oracle BPM Model will definitely be an eye catcher.

E-Business Fusion which is the long term track of Oracle which started with the Release 12 version of the ERP System provides hot pluggable points to interface with other systems.

Following new trends could be seen in SOA
* Building of Enterprise Services and having a Enterprise Services Repository that help in adaptive bundling of custom applications and processes
* Ready to use Enterprise / Business Process templates few of which are Industry specific
* Importance of a having a corporate SOA Governance strategy
* Technology trends like Web 2.0 that helps in integrating transaction, information and analytics into seamless composite applications
* Seamless integration of technologies like Groovy, Grails, Glassfish and even PHP etc. into the SOA with compatible language and grammar.
* New trends in BPEL, BPML, BAM etc. that define the Business Process Languages
* SOA Refactoring becoming a common process in continuous improvements in solution landscapes

PCQuest : With Enterprise 2.0 and cloud computing gaining grounds, what role does SOA has to play in such areas?
Fujitsu : Enterprise 2.0 and cloud computing explain the real use of SOA in terms of composition of services from various sources and have a collective implementation. This gives importance, for the first time, to the Service Consumption layer and shifting the focus from pure Service Provisioning.

While SaaS still explores on providing re-usable Services, Enterprise 2.0 (based on Web 2.0) help in better adoption and utilization of these Services thus in effective realizing the goals of SOA architecture. These services like wikis, blogs, enterprise search etc. are now part of standard portal software ex: SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal etc.

PCQuest : It’s being touted that SOA in near future will blend into Web-Oriented Architecture (SaaS). What are your thoughts in this regard? Does the next step after SOA is towards cloud-computing? Or will SOA be an important part of cloud-computing framework?
Fujitsu : Software as Service (SaaS) will definitely make the IT Services more accessible and simultaneously result in lowering the costs. But since SaaS involves exposing services out of the boundaries of a Company network security will be the first concern before an enterprise thinks about it. On-demand services are rapidly growing in the market and SOA will open up more aspects to it. As mentioned above Web Orineted Architecture is true implementation of SOA of which SaaS is only a part of it.

We should consider WOA as the Service Consumption layer while SaaS as the Service Provision layer and thus equal importance in furthering the SOA landscapes.

PCQuest : SOA is all about consuming services efficiently. In Enterprise 2.0 domain, how can an enterprise go about implementing SOA to have maximum benefit, and what kind of technologies will it have to deploy?
Fujitsu : Actually, SOA is more then just consuming web services. In Fujitsu we have used SOA for point-to-point architecture to complex orchestration logics for ERP Cycles. Like the Order-to-Cash Integration cycle exposes itself and can be reused for other implementations.

AIA has new Web Service registry module which acts as a repository and knowledgebase for the existing Web services developed by the organization.

Depending upon the complexity and feasibility enterprise can go for A2A or B2B architecture. SOA suite holds almost all the elements to cater the need of any enterprise.

From technology stack the minimum requirement is Application Server and SOA suite (BPEL, ESB) which is sufficient to provide A2A integration. Oracle Business Rules provides the flexibility to manage the Business Rules from one central system. Business Activity Monitor (BAM) can be very useful where high visibility is required at every point.

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