CIOL: What is the traction in the SOA business so far?

Sunil Mehra: SOA helps businesses respond quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions. By promoting SOA, they can reuse existing IT assets rather than invest in more time consuming and costly reinvention or new implementation (rip and replace).

The adoption of SOA in India has been relatively slower as compared to the rest of the world. The primary reason is the lack of understanding and misconception that SOA is more of a technology requirement rather than a business decision. In fact, SOA provides significant benefits that ultimately allow companies to focus more resources and budget on innovation and on delivering new business services. In the Oracle Grid Index IV report released in August 2006, over 50 percent of the Indian enterprises said that they were actively moving closer to or have already moved to an SOA infrastructure. In India, customers from banking and financial services, manufacturing, retail, telecom, healthcare and even the government are enquiring about SOA technology.

In fact, more and more ISVs are standardising their applications on Oracle Fusion Middleware, so that customers can leverage open, complete, standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, provided by Oracle and its partners.  Customers and ISVs will benefit from lower costs of implementation, accelerated delivery times and a lower cost in the event of future changes. Some of these ISVs include Path Infotech, Q-Soft, Nippon Data Systems among others.

CIOL: What is the rate of SOA adoption among your customers in India vs international?
SM: Like I mentioned, the adoption of SOA in India has been relatively slower as compared to the rest of the world. However, we are observing a lot of interest among customers on this technology.

CIOL: Have customers gone beyond the experimental stage to actual implementation?

SM: Like I already mentioned, SOA is generating interest only now. However, we recently started an SOA implementation at Godfrey Phillips.

CIOL: What are the business processes that are mainly impacted by SOA currently?

SM: SOA is a software architecture that enables business agility through the use of loosely coupled services. Services are reusable business functions that can be discovered and invoked using open standard protocols across networks. Services can in turn be combined and orchestrated to produce composite services and business processes, in accordance with pre-defined policies, security and SLAs. SOA is ideally suited to an organisation where constant innovation is required and where multiple complex systems need to be integrated on to one platform to ensure smooth functioning.

CIOL: What is the key business advantage to be derived from an SOA setup?

SM: SOA benefits: SOA helps lower development and maintenance costs, offers higher quality services, helps lower integration costs and reduces risks for better corporate (SOA) governance. Next, it is easy to implement, without disrupting existing business’ operations and infrastructure. In 2006, Oracle worked directly with over 100 early adopters to understand what types of projects benefited from an SOA approach. Our research identified 100- 500 percent improvement. Some of the interesting findings include:

• One customer changed the game of integration by reducing the response time for integration change requests from two months to five days, delivered without extra budget by non-expert, internal IT staff.
• Another customer reduced time to market of a major IT project from two years to six months, while improving business users’ satisfaction with the application through iterative validation and refinement.
• In fact, the most enlightened adopters of SOA leverage BPM (business process management) best practices such as top-down process mapping, iterative/agile development, and layered-services architectures to fight the “business/IT alignment gap” and derive maximum value from SOA.
• SOA helped yet another customer to fight one of the burning issues of large IT organizations: how to reduce the enormous costs (often 70–80 percent of the IT budget) and resource needs (30 people to diagnose an issue in tightly coupled COBOL code) of maintaining legacy mainframe systems.

CIOL: What are the challenges involved?

SM: As great as the benefits might be, there are also challenges involved in pursuing the SOA dream. Beyond the well-known performance penalty from using XML, there are numerous lesser-known challenges in using a Web services-oriented architecture (WSOA). Nonetheless, belief in the loosely-coupled WSOA mantra might lead you to believe that coupling is not an issue in WSOA. On the contrary, coupling remains an issue, and the real role of coupling in WSOA has been downplayed.

The quest for a more integrated enterprise drives enterprise IT to be more interconnected. A more interconnected system is more difficult to understand, build, test, maintain, change, adapt, or improve. This greater coupling can dramatically increase complexity. An agile, integrated IT is more complex than independent IT processes. In contrast, segregating software functionality into independent pieces is primarily how reliable, maintainable systems are created. This is one reason why many enterprises have application silos in the first place.