The Service Advantage

You're the CIO of a leading company. As your business is growing

rapidly, you want to roll out new or upgraded applications for your customers.

Your technology resources are directly dependent on the consumer demand, which

is highly unpredictable in the current business scenario. But to conserve costs,

you can't afford to deploy resources that are surplus or underutilized at any

given point of time. Also, you can't infuse fresh investments for infrastructure

to run new applications.

So the challenge before you is to devise a cost-effective

strategy that meets the on-demand computing needs of information

consumers-internal as well as external. At the same time, you want to meet your

core business objectives by aligning your business processes with the IT

infrastructure, while optimizing capital and operating costs. To deal with such

a situation, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a viable option.

The Service Focus



In simple terms, SOA is a strategy that aims to organize enterprise IT

resources around services rather than around applications. As a result, the

users in a network gain access to applications as independent services that are

delivered in a standardized way. Traditionally, enterprise applications are

dependent on IT platforms and programming languages and are based mainly on

point-to-point rigid architectures connecting applications with a predetermined

set of users. On the other hand, SOA is about loosely coupled, interoperable

services that work seamlessly irrespective of the operating platforms, giving

flexibility to user organizations to deploy their resources as per information

demand.

So instead of developing or deploying monolithic applications,

companies can create repositories of reusable software components that form the

building blocks for an application. As these components can be integrated using

a service-based standard and are independent of underlying technologies, they

can be used efficiently to quickly streamline business processes and to meet

changing information-based customer expectations. Thus, the SOA methodology

helps to transform conventional applications into business components termed as

services. These services can range from business to technical-say, transaction

posting to network communication.

In a SOA model, a service provider is connected with a service

consumer through a service link. Web services, for example, use XML to provide

the service link that facilitates delivery of Web services from service

providers to diverse set of users who use disparate client systems for Web

access. However, experts believe that conventional Web services don't depict an

example of true SOA. While Web services are loosely coupled application

components, linked with standards such as XML, SOA is a methodology to deliver

loosely coupled, protocol independent computing based on specific standards. In

the latter case, services are published by applications and are offered to meet

various SLA objectives.

In today's e-business environment where customers and customer

demands are increasing at a breakneck speed and sellers are struggling to cope

with the mounting information demand levels, the use of SOA



becomes inevitable.

Enterprise Adoption



Though currently SOA is passing through an evolutionary phase, most

businesses are showing an increasing interest in this technology model.

According to a survey conducted by the Yankee Group-out of a sample of 473

enterprise decision makers, nearly three-fourth of them have planned to invest

in SOA, starting in 2005. Today, the main driver for SOA adoption is the

business demand that forces enterprise data centers to deliver more with minimal

resources. And SOA is expected to be a critical business enabler rather than a

mere IT tool.

Clearly, SOA holds more significance for enterprises that deal

with mass consumers. This will not only help enterprises generate new revenue

streams, but will also empower them to prevent 'churn'.

Now the onus is on the CIOs to implement SOA effectively. For

this, they need to identify the enterprise areas where SOA could deliver

immediate business benefits. Then they need to select the right technology that

promises cost optimization and quicker returns. Since SOA has emerged as a prime

requirement for corporate data centers, major technology vendors are offering

myriad solutions to the buyers. They are even providing necessary handholding to

enterprise users to understand and implement SOA.

While most solutions cover end-to-end enterprise

requirements-from SOA assessment to SOA management-companies can select the

solution keeping in view their current and future information needs.

Challenges



Enterprise CIOs need to understand SOA issues and implement it after

analyzing the complete SOA lifecycle. In the legacy IT environments, for

example, it may not be possible to extract service from an application. So SOA

may not be the right option to replace legacy systems. While standards form the

cornerstone for SOA, companies need to take a standards-based approach to

implement SOA for internal as well as external service delivery.

Companies that want to embrace SOA should take a cautious

approach-moving one step at a time from project to project-say, from sales order

processing application to supplier payments. It may not be wise to take a

revolutionary path to replace all applications at once with SOA. Rather, an

evolutionary system that imparts learning as you grow can be beneficial.

No doubt, SOA is getting increasingly popular. Now it's time for

enterprises to translate this popularity into profits. Only then SOA's full

potential will be realized.

-Rakesh Raman



The author is an independent technology journalist