CIOs have, typically, always struggled with optimum utilization and integration of disparate IT system across the globe. Various initiatives were taken to address this pain. Each initiative helped in alleviating the integration and reusability issues. SOA evolved out of these initiatives and has today become the de-facto standard for designing large and complex applications and integrating them.

According to Vinod Ponmanadiyil, IT consultant, Product Engineering Group, LogicaCMG, SOA is widely considered as the most effective way of overcoming IT complexities involved in businesses that require their IT systems to be flexible and adaptive enough to address changing business needs. SOA has emerged as a crucial enabler in the field of on-demand IT and business computing for enterprises. Gartner reports that SOA-related services will reach $8.6 billion this year, more than double last year's spending, and grow to $34 billion by 2010.

Key business advantages associated with SOA:

Efficiency: Transform business processes from siloed, replicated processes into highly leveraged, shared services that cost less to maintain.

Responsiveness: Rapid adaptation and delivery of key business services to meet market demands for increased service levels to customers, employees, and partners.

Adaptability: More effectively rollout changes throughout the business with minimal complexity and effort, saving time and money.

LogicaCMG’s SOA business:

LogicaCMG is a major international force in IT and business services. It employs around 40,000 people across 41 countries. LogicaCMG’s focus is on enabling customers to build and maintain leadership positions by using its deep industry knowledge and track record for successful delivery. The company provides business consulting, systems integration and IT and business process outsourcing across diverse markets including telecoms and media, financial services, energy and utilities, industry, distribution and transport and the public sector.

LogicaCMG has executed number of projects on SOA architecture using both Microsoft and J2EE framework and platform. Hence, it is seeing customers move toward actual implementation. LogicaCMG's Global Service Delivery center in Bangalore has built substantial knowledge, skills and assets to address the market demand for SOA. An SOA Centre of Excellence (CoE) has been established in the Product Engineering group. The CoE has experts who specialize in helping clients leverage the value of SOA and Web services.

On gaining a competitive edge with SOA:

SOA solutions allow organizations to compose applications needed to support new business processes in days, rather than months. This helps organizations in significant cost reduction internally as well as enable them to gain competitive edge by delivering new products or services to their customers faster.

However, the path also has challenges to contend with. He added that moving from pilots to real-world service-oriented integration and applications was really challenging. These range from investment justifications over processes to re-use of services across the organization. The biggest challenge would be to identify the right-sizing of services. Furthermore important challenges of SOA are the management of services and other infrastructure that are required to support services.

Best Practices in SOA:

As for best practices, he said that SOA adoption significantly involved retraining, business and IT decision-making processes, governance and security. The key steps to faster and efficient SOA adotption were:

* Identify granular services. Use coarse-grained, document based service interfaces. The need for Interoperable service creation is paramount;

* Define the workflow and frequently changing business logic in external business rules;

* Implement process orchestration, workflow and rules;

* Security and management; and

* Performance and scalability