Optimize the business outcome of SOA

BANGALORE, INDIA: Today, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a mainstream IT initiative that ranks among the top priorities of CIOs. SOA dramatically improves the flexibility and adaptability of organizations by accelerating the time to market for new applications and processes, driving down IT costs by making services highly reusable and building business processes to support change. As a result, organizations can react faster, seize new opportunities and respond more quickly to competitive threats.

But with these benefits come new risks. If not properly implemented, SOA can disrupt the business. If you build the wrong services or build them in the wrong way, you will not be able to use them to compose new applications or business processes. Or worse, you will jeopardize a key business by using a service that is untested, ungoverned and unmanaged.



Instead of becoming more agile, your business could become more fragile. Creating these new processes is clearly a risky endeavor. Attempting SOA without these processes is even more risky.

SOA drives business results

Today’s enterprises are reliant on IT to drive business value. Software applications drive mission-critical business processes. IT is now measured on how quickly and cost effectively it can deliver high-quality applications that produce business results.

Compounding the challenge for IT, the competitive landscape is causing a demand for increased business agility. IT is responding by embracing SOA.

The promise of SOA is simple yet huge—greater business agility and the alignment of IT with the business. SOA helps you to rapidly modify business processes, quickly address new competitive threats and accelerate the introduction of new products and services into the market.

The service-oriented approach delivers IT systems as a set of reusable services that can be assembled easily to create a composite application that automates a business process. This “assembly approach” accelerates the time to market for new applications and reduces IT costs. SOA better aligns business and IT and shifts the focus away from the nuances of underlying technologies toward abstracted services that make sense to the business.

These abstracted services are often called “business services.” It is important to understand that business services are business assets, not simply IT assets. They reflect the way a business runs and generally correspond to a common, repeated business function, such as “add customer” or “check credit.”

Critically, services are designed to be reused, and this requires a new way for developers and project teams to think and work.

New services need to be built specifically for reuse, and not as stove-piped systems with narrow, constrained functions. In addition, services need to conform to enterprise-wide mandates on quality and must adhere to business and IT policies.

They need to be easily accessible and simple to adopt. The goal is for application developers and business analysts to be able to easily find and reuse services to construct new applications and compose new business processes.

By enabling business services to be used and shared by multiple business processes or composite applications, SOA provides a number of business benefits:

• Faster time-to-market for new applications helps organizations achieve competitive advantage by rapidly seizing new opportunities and responding to threats.

• Flexible applications create flexible business processes, making the organization more agile and adaptable in the face of changing business requirements.

• Service reuse creates greater efficiency and lowers maintenance costs.

• The ability to respond quickly to new regulatory requirements or specific compliance issues helps companies avoid governmental penalties.

In short, SOA has the power to transform IT from a bottleneck and cost center into a value driver by becoming a key source of business agility and competitive advantage.

SOA success demands solving a broad array of challenges

Because of its promise, SOA is a mainstream IT initiative that ranks among the top priorities of CIOs. But with the benefits of SOA come new risks. If not properly implemented and deployed, SOA can disrupt the business. If you build the wrong services or build them in the wrong way, you will not be able to use them to compose new applications or business processes.

Or worse, you will jeopardize a key business by using a service that is untested, ungoverned and unmanaged. Instead of becoming more agile, your business could become more fragile.

The risks are due to a wide variety of new challenges:



• Lack of ability to advertise or discover services that are spread across the enterprise prevents constituents from consistently finding them.

•Consumers don’t trust or can’t control a service even if they can locate it, so they recreate it.

• Testing of services designed for reuse is difficult and time-consuming, so there is typically insufficient testing.

• There is no reliable way to define, measure and enforce service-level agreements between the provider and consumer.

•Changes to the service infrastructure impact the availability and performance of the service.

• There is insufficient visibility into the requirements for a service, whether it is a high-level business requirement or a functional, performance or availability and service-level requirement.

• Services are created and deployed without enough regard for corporate governance or suitability for reuse.

• Your organization does not have the right skill set to take your SOA program beyond an initial pilot or proof-of-concept project.

Start at the area of greatest pain

HP provides a complete solution across the entire SOA lifecycle: SOA governance, quality and management.

While we generally recommend that, after the basics of assessment and business planning, customers start by addressing governance issues first, you can easily start wherever you need to—at the area of greatest pain.

While you will eventually need to address all the different challenges that SOA poses, our solution allows you to start where you feel pain right now based on the state of your deployment and on your business needs.