Handle with Care

After understanding the finer nuances of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the enterprise CIOs are supposed to analyze their information needs and the application infrastructure to apply SOA in the best possible way. As SOA promises to provide enormous benefits toward improving the application development and delivery mechanisms, enterprises need to study the role of SOA during its entire lifecycle-starting right from the selection of solution to its integration with business processes and management.

Moving Step by Step

Most enterprise CIOs realize that there's hardly any cookie-cutter recipe that could take care of their information management needs. That holds true for SOA also. So the fundamental need for CIOs is to study their applications and identify those that require SOA support. “When planning an enterprise service portfolio, there are three fundamental challenges: service oriented analysis, service design, and service management,” says Susanta Mishra, senior project manager, PSI Data Systems. The selection of solution would be strictly based on the need that would vary from company to company and from business to business.

Today, many solution vendors include their proprietary set of basic SOA tools in their offerings. However, solutions based on widely accepted or open standards are considered better for enterprise applications. “CIOs must be careful in using any proprietary framework,” says Soumya Ghosh, delivery manager, Hi-tech Business Unit, Virtusa (India). “The solution must adhere to industry standards for interoperability.”

 In today's business environment where applications connect disparate systems and diverse sets of users, interoperability is among the prime expectations from a solution like SOA. And a good solution will have built-in interoperability features. “SOA brings programmatic interaction between service components over the Internet using worldwide accepted open standards based interfaces,” says Dilip Dhanuka, vice president, Products and Technology Group, Patni. “Consumer applications can program to the services without bothering about the implementation technology details, enabling high interoperability between heterogeneous applications and automated business collaboration.”

Moreover, the user enterprises should evaluate common performance parameters such as scalability, availability, security, and ease of use while buying a SOA solution. However, besides technology factors, there are other cost and market considerations that CIOs should take into account. “CIOs should consider distributed deployment and lifecycle management support along with the vision and future roadmap of the solution vendor,” suggests Dhanuka. In general, CIOs should prefer a vendor that could provide end-to-end solution covering SOA assessment, development, deployment, management, and so on.

On the Right Track

Considering that SOA is a relatively new concept for the Indian enterprises, the CIOs can take advice from SOA experts to ensure smooth implementation. After prioritizing the applications and business processes for SOA, they must make a long-term plan-say, from three to five years-to effectively realize the SOA benefits. “Going with a big bang approach of implementing SOA across the businesses is not advisable. First of all, companies should assess the impact on the top line and bottom line and decide on applying SOA for the areas where the impact is the most,” says Ghosh.

Further, there will be migration challenges that CIOs will need to tackle. These challenges would pertain to new technology, skills, management, and so on. “To move to SOA, new infrastructure will need to be brought in to support lifecycle of services participating in SOA. And the staff will need to acquire new skills,” says Dhanuka. Enterprise CIOs can also follow specific methodologies while handling migration issues. “SOA does not advocate a 'rip and replace' approach. It's recommended that CIOs adopt a 'leave and layer' approach in which functionality from existing systems is exposed as standards-based services. These services can then be called by other applications or services,” says Dhruv Singhal, head, Professional Services, BEA Systems.

The design, deployment, and management of SOA are equally important factors for companies adopting this architecture. “Failure to implement SOA without adequate focus on architecture, results in a largely crippled, rather than loosely coupled architecture,” observes Ghosh. Further, it would be an imperative for many Indian enterprises to protect their investments made in legacy systems while introducing SOA. For this, they need to adopt an SOA solution that supports legacy environment. “If the investment in legacy software needs be preserved, then organizations need to find if the legacy vendors or third parties are extending support for SOA enabling the particular legacy software,” suggests Dhanuka. The role of CIOs will be to identify the legacy applications on which SOA could be applied seamlessly. “Service orientation is a means for protecting existing IT investments without inhibiting the deployment of new capabilities,” says Mishra.

The other implementation tasks include creation of SOA governance model, reuse process, a repository for reference artifacts, and a catalogue for reusable services. “It is impossible to have a well-managed SOA without a central registry/repository,” says Ghosh. “The repository should discover and promote services for reuse, map relationships among various assets for impact analysis, and track and measure the value of the SOA. Without this repository, Web services and other applications built on the SOA often end up being developed in isolation and misaligned with architecture. The end result is increased complexity and costs.”

Moreover, it's also important for CIOs to select suitable technologies such as Web services, messaging, and so on.

While these are some of the key aspects that demand CIOs' attention, enterprises need to plan for the entire SOA lifecycle, including development, deployment, integration, delivery, and management, for a successful SOA implementation. And with the right approach, they can expect enormous technology and business benefits from SOA.

Rakesh Raman

The author is an independent technology journalist

mail@dqindia.com