Prem Nithin- Sr. Technical Consultant, Cisco, India & SAARC, points out that SOA has gained significant impetus over the last few years, and helps companies deploy applications faster and at reduced costs.

CIOL: What is the traction in the SOA business so far?
Prem Nithin: IT organizations are under continuous pressure to decrease costs and improve responsiveness. One way to achieve this is to adapt SOA. SOA has gained significant impetus over the last few years and consists of breaking monolithic applications into small, reusable components. The latest version of this trend, building on the growing popularity of Extensible Markup Language (XML), is known as service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA lets companies deploy applications more quickly and at reduced cost by promoting reuse and facilitating integration.

Although the objectives of applying reuse and modularity to application design are not new, the widespread availability of Web services technologies built on top of XML standards has given a new momentum to SOA. Few area where most of the companies are looking at SOA is to: 

·                     Improve the overall alignment of IT with business processes — Web services can be designed to directly implement individual business activities. The expected result is that as business processes change, these services can quickly be rearranged to reflect new workflows. 

·                     Control the cost of creating new business applications — Preventing duplication of applications or application services is a major motivation for an SOA. A new application can be created largely through reconfiguration of existing SOA modules. Reusable modules also greatly reduce the development time and maintenance costs, while simultaneously increasing the consistency of the data and quality of the application. 

·                     Improve the ability to integrate applications (for example, custom applications, packaged applications, and third-party application services) — SOA interfaces facilitate standards-based application integration without special adapters or information bus technology. 

·                     Comply with regulations that require maintaining confidentiality, concurrency, and integrity of information — An SOA can facilitate the establishment of a “single source of truth” that can be protected, validated, and relied upon better than multiple disparate data sources. 

·                     Preserve investment in existing applications — Existing code and platform-dependent implementations can be preserved as SOA application components or business services modules.

CIOL: How does Cisco's SONA reduce complexity in managing IT resources?

PN: Cisco's SONA (Service-Oriented Network Architecture ) is the key to reducing the complexity of managing IT resources in major corporations. Cisco's SONA is an enterprise architecture framework that describes how enterprises can realize the benefits of Cisco’s Intelligent Information Network (IIN) vision. Enterprises that adopt Cisco SONA use more of their network assets with greater efficiency, allowing them to realize cost savings even as requirements for devices, systems, services, and applications grow. Using Cisco SONA increases overall IT efficiency and use, enhancing overall IT effectiveness. Cisco calls this increase the "network multiplier effect".

In many ways, computer technology is a victim of its own success. Businesses and other organizations now operate so many applications, services, databases, data storage facilities, and other resources that management overhead is threatening to eclipse the benefits these technologies offer.

In India specifically, large enterprise CIOs are aware of SOA and are evaluating it with some in the process of implementing it. Further, with the concept of managed services gaining momentum in the SMB segment, it’s only a matter of time before service providers start implementing SOA to effectively deliver applications/services.

CIOL: Do you see customers going into actual implementation?

PN: Yes, there are customers who already have SONA based network architecture in place.

CIOL: What is the rate of SOA adoption among your customers in India as against the international scenario?

PN: It’s difficult to come up with a comparative adoption rate between India and the international markets at this point in time. However, it’s fair to say that all existing networks will eventually have to move toward SOA. The ability of an enterprise to derive value from its network will be its differentiator in an increasingly competitive global business environment.

CIOL: How does SOA enable businesses to gain competitive edge?

PN: SOA helps enterprises derive business value across their entire organization. Specifically, it helps them:

·                     Increase productivity and efficiency while reducing costs -- SOA promotes more effective use of networked resources, leading to improved workforce efficiency and lower capital and operating expenses. For example, virtualization technologies such as virtual firewalls, Cisco InfiniBand switching, and VLAN segmentation improve resource use and free other resources, protecting network investment.

·                     Increase resiliency and business agility -- Cisco SONA integrates voice, video, and data services across a converged platform that can scale throughout a distributed enterprise environment. The architecture incorporates enterprisewide intelligent infrastructure that includes built-in redundancy, allowing the network to respond and recover more rapidly from service disruptions and outages. The benefits include higher network availability and improved employee productivity. In addition, Cisco products enable tight application integration, allowing shared visibility and communication between business applications and network services. These advanced capabilities allow enterprise employees to respond more quickly to changing market demands.

·                     Improve customer relationships -- Intelligent networks enhance application and data visibility across the enterprise. Employees benefit from speedier, more accurate, and more available access to corporate data, improving their ability to serve customers, partners, and suppliers. For example, with Cisco SONA, enterprises could integrate customer relationship and supply chain management applications with their IP-based call centers, thereby giving all attendants in a global organization concurrent access to real-time information. An attendant at a help desk would have the same information about the caller as a customer support representative, improving the calling experience for the customer.

·                     Increase revenue and maximize business opportunities -- A centrally managed and unified architecture across a standardized platform allows employees to make more informed business decisions and bring products to market faster. For example, with Cisco SONA, R&D teams and corporate decision makers in various geographical sites could benefit from shared access to data retrieved from multiple integrated data bases situated in numerous locations. This would provide them with more consistent, accurate, and current data, and allow them to make better decisions more rapidly. In turn, this would speed product development lifecycles and yield better business results.

CIOL: What would you say are the challenges involved with the implementation of SOA?

PN: In most cases, new infrastructure has been deployed for each new application. This infrastructure is often funded and selected by application groups that are embedded in the company’s business units, rather than by a central IT organization. However, the central IT organization often finds itself maintaining and operating all these complex, disparate infrastructures as well as responding to expectations that IT will meet service levels and control costs.

Deploying infrastructure on an application-by-application basis leads to a fractured infrastructure that leads to higher cost of operation and slow response to change. Other symptoms include:

1) Heterogeneous systems — A wide range of compute platforms, operating systems, storage devices, and network infrastructure.

2) Isolated silos of resources — Compute, network, and storage resources are available only to the application that they were deployed to support.

3) Under-utilization — Server utilization varies by platform, but is typically low (for Windows, 8 to 15 percent; UNIX, 28 to 45 percent; and mainframes, 65 to 75 percent). Large enterprises typically employ (and underutilize) thousands of small servers. Overall data center utilization is about 25 percent.

There are specific reasons as to why the standalone approach to building infrastructure fails to deliver to the new business requirements:

a) Providing business agility — Implementing each new application or service requires deploying a new set of infrastructure resources.

b) Controlling costs — Maintaining many separate silos and different operating environments drastically reduces the operational efficiency of the IT organization, and low utilization levels lead to a notably higher total cost of ownership (TCO).

c) Facilitating regulatory compliance — Supporting data silos and duplicate copies of data leads to inconsistencies, inaccuracies, together with confidentiality and business continuance challenges.

d) Supporting application service levels — Inconsistent security and disaster recovery practices lead to longer downtime and degraded performance. Also, provisioning infrastructure resources statically to a given application leads to performance challenges as demand changes.

e) Enabling effective information management — Data dispersed within multiple storage silos prevents the development of tiered storage and constrains the migration of data through the information lifecycle. Also, having information and database silos results in inconsistent and contradictory data repositories that are difficult to rationalize.

CIOL: What would you say are the best practices in SOA adoption?

PN: IT organizations looking to evolve to an SOI should take some basic steps to help ensure that SOA requirements are reflected in SOI planning and implementation. These steps fall into three categories: governance, planning and design, and operations and management.

Governance

1) When developing an SOI business case, make sure that both hard and soft benefits associated with a robust SOA deployment are well reflected.

2) Build a cross-functional architecture team that — in addition to storage, networking, management, and security architects — includes the applications and SOA architect.

3) Charter the architecture team to create a three-to-five-year end-state vision for the data center architecture and a phased roadmap for getting there. Map the SOI roadmap to the SOA roadmap if and when it is available.

4) Design the SOI funding model for the data center to reflect a usage and service-level model that accounts for the implementation of an SOA.

5) Make organizational changes that reflect the needs of SOA and SOI. One option that Cisco IT is implementing is to realign the applications organization around business processes and to realign the infrastructure organization around the resource services that they provide.

Planning and design

1) Identify relevant near-term challenges and wins, such as server standardization, storage consolidation, server I/O consolidation, and application delivery optimization. Implement these solutions in the context of a broader SOI and SOA strategy.

2) Investigate virtualization technologies such as server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization, and cluster computing in the context of supporting an SOA.

3) Review product development roadmaps with strategic infrastructure vendors and identify those that best align with your three- to five-year SOA and SOI roadmaps.

4) Determine which applications can be evolved or implemented as an SOA, which can be ported to a shared standardized SOI infrastructure, and which need to be maintained on their current infrastructure silos in the interim. Target an 80:20 rule for SOA and SOI implementations against those that need to be maintained on existing infrastructure.

5)  Ensure that the business continuance capabilities of the infrastructure can meet the demands of an SOA. The concept of RPO and RTO per application needs to be re-visited, since the application can be using services that are deployed across widely dispersed infrastructures.

Operations and Management

1) Change processes to focus on supporting cross-technology infrastructure services and not just individual devices.

2) Try to make sure that infrastructure services can be defined centrally and enforced consistently on an end-to-end basis: security, metering, quality of service, and so on. Implement management tools to provide a complete view of the end-to-end application and infrastructure elements (in a shared environment — none of these will be dedicated — so management tools must effectively monitor all the elements involved).