Increasing interest to adopt SOA

BANGALORE, INDIA: To thrive in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, top businesses of all sizes and in all industries are looking at SOA that enables them to achieve operational excellence and run the company more efficiently in a cost-effective way. In an exclusive interview with CIOL, Naveen Gupta, VP, technical sales and services, IBM India/SA, talks about trends driving SOA and IBM’s presence in the Indian Enterprise market.

Excerpts:

CIOL:  What are the trends driving SOA among Indian enterprises?

Naveen Gupta: Large enterprises across all verticals are adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based solutions for business related issues. IBM has been a pioneer in evangelizing SOA and its benefits in the global market place, IBM has witnessed increasing interest from customers towards SOA adoption in India. Intense competition, rapid advancements and heavy scaling especially in the telecom and banking space are driving companies to facilitate the adoption of SOA. IBM leverages WebSphere to offer solutions on SOA for its customers in India.

To thrive in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, top businesses of all sizes and in all industries are looking at SOA for better ways to:

· Achieve operational excellence that enables them to run their companies more efficiently and cost-effectively.

· Drive innovation that matters to recognize market needs and respond to them quickly and decisively.

CIOL: How has IBM been able to capture the Indian Enterprise market?

NG: Springboard Research’s latest report expects the SOA market in India to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent from 2007-2010 making it the fastest growing market in the regions. According to the same report, IBM remained the leading SOA vendor in the Asia Pacific region.

Probably one of the biggest hurdles to SOA is a clear understanding and awareness by the marketplace of SOA and its benefits. IBM recently opened the SOA Leadership Center in India designed to address the growing demand for skills needed to solve customer business challenges using Service Oriented Architectures. The center is set up in Bangalore and is the first of its kind in Asia Pacific and the fourth of a series of SOA Leadership Centers planned across the world.

This Centre will provide a venue for customers and IBM Business Partners to see SOA solutions in action through SOA proof of concepts to demonstrate the potential benefits of SOA in a customer's existing IT infrastructure. The Center will also help address SOA skills through relationships with local universities. Through these relationships, IBM is helping to shape the curricula and provide opportunities for students to develop the proper skills to succeed with SOA in their chosen fields when they enter the workforce. Local students can have the opportunity to serve as interns at these centres, work hands on with technologies that support SOA and attend education sessions delivered by IBM experts.

In India, IBM and IBM Business Partners are taking an end-to-end approach to SOA which allows enterprises to customize the speed of their technology implementation.

IBM's approach to SOA includes low cost offerings on popular Windows, Linux and System i platforms to help protect your current skills and applications. The easy to learn and use tools let you connect applications and transform information, helping deliver consistent and accurate information to employees, partners and customers.

Another is the "how do I get started" question as many businesses may feel overwhelmed. IBM has defined five SOA entry points based on real customer experiences and engagements and we believe that SOA is best approached on an individual project basis:

To help them get started with SOA, IBM offers 5 business-centric and IT-centric SOA entry points. They can get started with an approach that begins with the fundamental assets of their enterprise—people, information and processes.

The people entry point is a starting point for SOA, enabling people to interact with application and information services that support business processes. As a complement to the other entry points — process, information, reuse and connectivity—the people entry point can facilitate real time decision making and dynamic collaboration, and immediate execution. Overall, the people entry point approach to SOA drives business and operational flexibility and improves end-user productivity and collaboration.

The process entry point is a business-centric starting point for service oriented architecture (SOA) that provides specific tools and services to help streamline and improve processes across the enterprise. By entering SOA from process vantage, you can establish the foundation for IBM's business process management with SOA.

Information as a service is an entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) that offers information access to complex, heterogeneous data sources within your company as reusable services. These services may be available both within the enterprise and across your value chain. By entering SOA from an information vantage, you may improve the availability and consistency of information, while simultaneously removing traditional barriers to information sharing.

Service creation and reuse is an IT-centric entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) that focuses on deriving continued value from previous asset investments, identifying services to be outsourced and designing new services to fill portfolio gaps. By entering SOA from a service creation and reuse vantage, you may expand access to proven systems and achieve greater value from your existing technology investments. In fact, a study by Software Productivity Research found that it can be up to five times less expensive to reuse existing services and applications than to rewrite them.

Service connectivity is an IT-centric entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) designed to help simplify your IT environment with a more secure, reliable and scaleable way to connect within and beyond your business. Link people, processes and information in your business with a seamless flow of messages and information from virtually anywhere at anytime using anything — that's true connectivity. SOA brings new levels of flexibility to such linkages. Delivering real business value on its own, connectivity is also a core building block for future SOA initiatives.

CIOL: What are IBM's achievements in the enterprise market in 2007 and what are the new initiatives in 2008?

NG: .Springboard’s recent research positions IBM as the leading SOA vendor in the APAC region, where "proven products and solutions" is cited as the most important reason for choosing an SOA vendor.

· IBM has developed an SOA Foundation, an integrated set of open standards-based software, best practices, governance models and patterns to help clients model, assemble, deploy and manage SOA.

· IBM already has more than 3,000 SOA clients.

· IBM is best positioned to take advantage of the SOA phenomenon. One of IBM's biggest strengths in the emerging SOA marketplace is its wide breadth of offerings including middleware, business consulting, IT services, Research, SOA-optimized hardware, etc.

· IBM has broken down the barriers to SOA by helping its clients establish an SOA goal and take incremental steps toward that goal through a series of linked projects that have attractive ROI and business value in their own right.

· IBM’s unmatched global customer experience in every industry has helped it build the strongest portfolio of SOA software, consulting services and intellectual property of any vendor. 

With significantly more experience than other vendors and the largest market share, IBM is uniquely positioned to embed guidance based on real customer deployments into SOA — what we call the Smart SOA approach.

Essentially, the Smart SOA approach is a set of guiding principles we developed from working with the more than 5700 customers who use our SOA offerings. The Smart SOA approach benefits both business and IT by extending the business value of deployment. It demands that the principles of simplicity and robustness be applied regardless of what Smart SOA style you select. It also recognizes that your needs are evolving, and while you want to make sure that you are meeting basic needs with basic projects, you also want to make sure you have room to grow when your needs evolve and become more advanced.

Some of the key SOA clients in India include Bharti, DLF, BSNL, Tata Sky, Delhi International Airport , & State Bank of India.

CIOL: What is it that a CIO looks for to build a powerful information infrastructure in an enterprise?

NG: Without a foundation of useable information, their service-oriented architecture is just a loose confederation of abstract business processes. It's their business information that delivers the value to your SOA.

By leveraging rich, open standards and the flexibility of a Service Oriented Architecture, organizations can expand the business value of information, and drive up to 5 times more value creation than their less effective counterparts.

By decoupling data from the complexity of the heterogeneous data sources spread across an organization - delivering information as a service organizations can:

· Enhance the operational impact of information integration by embedding it directly into business processes

· Increase the accuracy and trust in information through consistent packaging of data

· Improve governance and control over information through the application of consistent rules for data access and usage

· Centralize the control and maintenance of integration points between sources, applications and business processes

A fundamental shift in the approach to IT, SOA requires a clear strategy, but it also requires an underlying IT infrastructure that can support it. A poorly designed infrastructure architecture can result in an inability to support SOA governance practices, meet end-to-end security requirements and achieve service level agreements. Your IT architecture must be secure, resilient and flexible.

It must be able to bridge the gap between application requirements and infrastructure capabilities to deliver computing resources in a dynamic manner. Many organizations, however, lack the internal expertise and proven methodologies necessary to design such an infrastructure.IBM SOA Infrastructure Consulting Services – infrastructure architecture and design for SOA helps them take the necessary steps toward building an infrastructure that can support an SOA.

CIOL: In your experience, what is that a CIO looks for when a vendor approaches him with a product/solution?

NG: CIOs have an SOA style which depends on their business needs and priorities. Using the SOA continuum, they can find value for all their SOA initiatives, from basic to advanced:

• Foundational – start with focused proven, high-ROI projects

• Extend end-to-end – innovate and optimize higher profile, core, end-to-end business processes for broader ROI

• Transform – innovate the business model by using IT for strategic advantage for ROI across the enterprise

• Adapt dynamically – initiate major shifts from the business side without direct IT involvement in this aspirational stage in which technology becomes invisible.

For globally integrated enterprises, SOA is a preferred method for delivering sustainable agility. As a business-driven IT architectural approach, SOA supports integrating the business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. This flexible approach allows organizations to update or re-orchestrate or even incorporate new tasks to meet changing business conditions without rebuilding their systems.

The most successful organizations — those transitioning to global integration — implement SOA with a focus on business value and use tested and proven techniques. They are partnering with vendors who will help them realize and maximize their returns.