Advertisment

Benefits of SOA-based development approach

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

While the fundamental objective of Service Oriented Architecture

(SOA) is to

ensure that all software capabilities are delivered and consumed as services,

enterprises can easily leverage this architecture to overhaul their application

infrastructure. As a result, they can create an environment to develop business

applications as a set of loosely coupled services. The need for the new approach

is quite acute considering that the conventional development methods bind a

business process tightly within a single application. This results in

underutilization of IT resources in the off-peak situations and lack of

resources, when the processing load is at its peak.



Also, in a traditional environment, applications exist as silos or there is a

custom-built integration between them with hardly any service reuse option

across the applications. “As each application has its own code for security,

auditing, logging, and exception handling, it results in inefficient use of IT

resources and delays in bringing new services to market,” observes Dhruv

Singhal, head, Professional Services, BEA

Systems
.



The inefficient use of infrastructure also puts an avoidable cost burden on

the user organization.



SOA Imperative

The SOA enables an enterprise to use the resources

optimally, as it helps to create an application by assembling discrete
application components. These are reusable components, which could be

orchestrated to build different applications for diverse business processes. So,

instead of allocating fixed IT resources for a particular application,

enterprises can make do with these smaller application components, making the

entire infrastructure highly flexible. That means the processing load of

different application services will be dynamically shared among different IT

resources, thereby, increasing IT productivity for the user company. And with

more efficient use of IT, companies can expect enhanced business agility and

profitability.



Since the SOA-based development approach involves the assembly of reusable

application components, new applications can be developed quickly. Thus, for

business expansion, companies can quickly offer new services to their customers,

while opening up more revenue streams for themselves. “As SOA enables

organizations to become more agile and respond faster to market conditions, they

can launch newer and better services in lesser time and lower cost,” says

Singhal of BEA Systems.























border=0 width="150" height="201">



border=0 width="150" height="197">



'As each application has its own code

for security, auditing, logging, and exception handling, it results in

inefficient use of IT resources and delays in bringing new services to

market'

-Dhruv Singhal, head, Professional Services, BEA

Systems



'With the variety of software vendors

and solution providers a best-of-breed approach is unthinkable, unless there is

a supporting technology framework'

-Akila Krishnakumar, CEO of

SunGard's offshore services division



There are enormous benefits of the SOA-based modular development approach. It

saves organizational resources that are required for developing, testing, and

delivering new services. With these services, companies can easily streamline

their business processes, making them more efficient, and responsive for

internal users as well as external business associates, including buyers and

suppliers. In fact, SOA serves as a business mapping mechanism that gives a

clear view of the services in relation to the business processes. Since SOA is

an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary one, it exploits the

existing best practices in an enterprise to leverage technology for business

gains. Thus, SOA empowers organizations to pull off more alignment between

business and IT.



While application cost is a major irritant for corporate CIOs, they can

optimize costs by utilizing SOA capabilities that get them freedom from

expensive proprietary platforms, as companies can develop standards-based open

solutions for various business needs. These solutions are technology-agnostic

and thus, provide utmost scalability to user organizations, as they decide to

use heterogeneous platforms. “With the variety of software vendors and solution

providers each with their own merits and niche areas of excellence, a

best-of-breed approach is unthinkable, unless there is a supporting technology

framework that is vendor-agnostic and based on mainstream open standards that

enables discrete components from various vendors to be plugged together to form

configurable, composite applications,” says Akila Krishnakumar, CEO of SunGard's

offshore services division. “The answer to these challenges is SOA.”



Applications and Benefits

Since SOA helps organizations achieve

higher degree of data and application integration to handle diverse business
processes, they can build a robust application infrastructure that adapts to

changing business requirements dynamically and cost effectively. “Service

implementations can be consolidated, made common, and reused across multiple

service consumers. In most cases, developing a new application means designing

only its presentation logic as a consumer of pre-existing services,” says

Wesemann of SunGard. Companies can use SOA for a host of tasks that include

administration services comprising auditing, security, and exception handling.

The SOA-based data access services help organizations capture customer

information from multiple backend systems.



The integration feature of SOA also becomes handy for companies to protect

their investments made in legacy systems. The legacy system access services, for

example, help them take updated information from legacy business information

systems or enterprise resource planning systems. Moreover, shared business

services make it easier for enterprises to add information about new customers

across multiple backend systems. Companies can also create customer information

portals for use among multiple portals, which can be done by using SOA-based

presentation services. The SOA also enables companies to develop composite

applications for personalization of services. As a result, enterprises can

expect an array of business and technology advantages to valiantly face the

fierce competition in the market.



“SOA's business benefits include the ability to roll out new applications and

business processes more quickly to respond to changes in the marketplace,” says

Singhal of BEA Systems. “Its IT benefits comprise reduced development time and

costs, and decreased integration cost and complexity.” Further, companies can

get rid of redundant data and systems, while leveraging existing IT

investments.



With all these benefits, SOA has emerged as a new enterprise mantra to manage

technology-led business growth. And it has all the strength to become an

indispensable part of the enterprise tech strategy. So can CIOs ignore SOA? No,

perhaps.



Rakesh Raman

The author is an

independent technology journalist

Source:Dataquest

tech-news