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.
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'As each application has its own code | 'With the variety of software vendors |
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