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SOAs for Business Integration

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CIOL Bureau
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By: Shailender Kumar, Country Manager, BEA Systems, India

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The notion of Business Integration — the seamless harnessing of people, systems and information across the organization to optimize the business's performance — is becoming increasingly understood and embraced by both IT and line of business managers as a necessary condition for survival in the 21st century. A company's IT capability now determines as much of its ability to compete, grow and meet its business goals as any of its other capital investments or intellectual property.



However, years of siloed IT projects, duplicated data, unwieldy applications, manual procedures and workarounds have ensured that IT spends most of its time and budget maintaining the status quo. This is done in lieu of establishing a strategic architecture that can be readily adapted to any business demand. Each new tactical demand lessens the likelihood of a necessary strategic makeover, as it monopolizes precious IT resources and adds further to the complexity — growing the feeling that 'we can never get there from here'.



During the last decade a generation of integration technologies — EAI, BPM, Enterprise Portals, Data Integration and others — emerged attempting to address these challenges and 'rescue' IT. Unfortunately, results haven't matched the promise. Each technology was a worthy idea, but was typically implemented as a single-purpose, proprietary solution needing specialist developers and analysts to operate, and subsequently to operate together with other components to achieve a semblance of 'Business Integration'.



Solving the IT Disconnect



Fortunately, a second generation of infrastructure software has been developed which addresses the cost and complexity shortcomings. It addresses the state-of-the-art design features not possible in the first generation and pre-integrates all previously separate technologies into a consistent enterprise application platform. It conforms to a best-practice service-oriented architecture for IT. The SOA is natively built on industry standards, promotes re-use and for the first time allows non-specialist developers to rapidly be productive with it.



SOAs for Business Integration



The service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a key component of adaptive business integration. SOA's definition — a paradigm for designing, developing, deploying and managing discrete, interoperable units of logic (services) within a computing environment — illustrates its breadth. It moves IT infrastructure from an inefficient, inflexible model — with vertical, siloed applications — to a less expensive, enterprise-wide model that delivers a reusable suite of services.



The services can utilize functionality offered by applications while effectively decoupling the applications from the underlying hardware.



The services can also communicate easily with each other and may be combined to realize complex functionality, such as end-to-end business processes, allowing the business to align directly with IT.



A key feature of a service-oriented architecture is that it is standards-based, promoting the use of industry-standard Web services technologies to help development, platform independence, and return on investment. With this, organizations are no longer tied to expensive, single-vendor solutions.



It is also modular. Simplification and standardization of information and application interfaces allows the development of modules that can be shared by multiple services. Modularization reduces complexity, making the service-oriented architecture more flexible, that is, easier to deploy, manage or change.



The benefits of this new infrastructure model are compelling, and Gartner expects service-oriented architecture be the prevailing IT infrastructure by 2008.



A recent SOA implementation delivered the following benefits to a prominent organization

:



  • A consistent look-and-feel with other Web services—encouraging user acceptance.


  • Enhanced user interface that was easier to understand—resulting in fewer support calls.


  • Offloading to industry-standard servers the hosting of its portal and Web services activities, typically performed by a high-cost infrastructure, improved performance and reduced hardware costs.


  • Standards-based infrastructure making better use of its developers who no longer required training on proprietary tools and APIs; developers could readily transfer to other projects.



**Read about ESB — The integration backbone in the next article.



*The views expressed in this column are those of the author and does not, reflect that of the organization.





 



 



 



 



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