Reaching the SOA Tipping Point

The core benefits that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises–cost reduction, increased business visibility, business empowerment, and greater business agility–are becoming increasingly understood and sought after, but the fact remains that many organizations are still struggling with various challenges in the early stages of their SOA initiatives. Many such challenges are organizational and political, and as a result, many well-meaning SOA initiatives have devolved into stopgap measures and political compromises. Such projects risk failure, delays, and cancellations.

To avoid such pitfalls, it’s increasingly important for organizations to take a pragmatic approach to SOA adoption that achieves business goals under the radar, building momentum and business value iteratively. For architects who are fed up with the status quo of IT and can see the big picture of the SOA value proposition for their organizations, taking such a pragmatic approach can be the most effective way to achieve the SOA tipping point, where the organization as a whole comes to accept and value SOA as mainstream across their organizations.

SOA in Any Economic Climate

Change is a constant in the competitive environment. The agility and flexibility that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables can help businesses weather the ongoing change that has become part of the routine of competition. These advantages are especially critical when contending with changing economic cycles. In today’s global economy, enterprises often contend with a mixed picture, serving different regions that are in varying phases of economic growth or slowdown. They must have the ability to flexibly adjust and calibrate go-to-market strategies, enhancing capacity or expanding products and services for regions in growth, while streamlining in areas whose economies are flattening or decelerating.

SOA can enable businesses to meet several key challenges when navigating a changing economy. The loosely-coupled nature of SOA promotes business agility, a capability that helps businesses adapt to changes in economic cycles. SOA also helps place a lid on integration costs because of its inclusion of a separate, standards-based integration layer. By liberating processes from closed, often poorly documented application silos, SOA can improve business process visibility. As organizations repurpose rather than replace existing software or business process assets, and compose rather than develop new processes or applications, SOA reduces lead time and cost of deploying new functionality. Finally, SOA plays an important role in supporting business-centric collaboration by empowering workgroups with the technology to overcome the business challenges that face them.

In changing economic conditions, IT organizations need to contain the scope and risk of any new project. Fortunately, SOA is conducive to iterative approaches that reduce risk. The flexibility of loosely—coupled Services enables them to evolve as business and IT teams mount the learning curve. Embarking on an iterative approach, organizations can realize quick wins from SOA,

Leveraging SOA for Agile Business Processes

Enterprises around the world are facing a momentous transformation, as they move away from traditional, inflexible approaches to leveraging information technology (IT) resources to a more agile way that helps to improve business process. This transition from an aggegration-centric view of technology that leads to brittle assemblages of heterogeneous assets to the composition-centric view that positions IT resources as flexible services that the business can compose together to support and manage flexible processes heralds a new era of value to organizations. Underpinning this transition is the move to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which provides best practices for organizing IT resources to enable organizations to better leverage business change.

Simplifying SOA

Enterprises around the world are increasingly pursuing the core business benefits of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)–business agility, reduction in integration expense, greater asset reuse, and improved business visibility. And yet, many large organizations are running into roadblocks with their heavyweight, enterprise-wide SOA initiatives. As an alternative, many organizations are finding a “right weight,” step-by-step approach to SOA is more effective and lowers risk as well. Such right weight approaches focus on departmental projects that leverage solutions like those from Active Endpoints that pull together Service creation, management, testing, and composition in a straightforward, “all you need and nothing more” environment that focuses on quick value without heavy skills or infrastructure requirements.

How to Define a Business Service

How to define a Business service is a pervasive and critical question that is essential to the success of any Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative. SOA projects can consist of too many moving parts causing confusion on what to use, reuse, or leverage. It then becomes the challenge of the architect to reduce this confusion by identifying the proper best practices for defining Services properly to meet the business goals set out for them.

Such practices include a variety of approaches. Architects can define a Service:

• in the context of business processes
• in the context of existing assets leveraging the business, information that the Service is expected to send or receive
• in an iterative fashion that delivers business value and decreases risk.

Combined with SOA governance processes that alleviate the challenges with managing too many moving parts, the architect will have the necessary best practices to manage the art and science of Service definition and accelerate SOA adoption.

Reinventing Workload Automation with SOA

Although typically thought of as an artifact of legacy computing, batch processes remain vital to today’s real-time enterprises. Behind the real time systems that power the real time enterprise, such as customer order fulfillment, account management, supply chain scheduling and optimization, or financial trading systems, are regularly-updated back office business systems. Over the years, batch technology has evolved from script-based automation to rules or policy-driven workload automation. By leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), enterprises can evolve batch workloads from standalone data center operations to components that are intrinsic to composite, Service-Oriented Business Applications. CA’s move to extend their AutoSys workload automation product by embracing SOA best practices and Web Services is an important step in transforming workload automation from its roots as an IT operations scheduling aid to a dynamic, business-driven process.

SOA Implementation Best Practices

The role of SOA is to provide an architectural approach that supports an organization’s ability to support ongoing business change in the face of a heterogeneous environment. However, since SOA does not introduce a new programming language or runtime environment, organizations must implement code that underpins and exposes a Service interface somehow. Since implementation matters to computers as much as architecture matters to people, it makes sense to consider the runtime environment of the implementation to be a good place to coordinate Service interactions.

When looking at the technology buying patterns in the world of SOA, there is one common thread. The influence of the larger SOA vendors is very much a force in the market today. Within this context, and given continued consolidation, confusion, and change in the SOA marketplace, organizations should make a careful evaluation of the various vendor offerings that support SOA implementations. The consolidation of SOA implementation capabilities has yielded a collection of vendors offering the new solution stack: the “SOA Platform”.

When comparing vendors, it is important to verify how their products and services address both parts of the lifecycle. If the vendor’s own products or services address the full lifecycle, what is their strategy for interoperating with other vendors whose products or services fill the gap? Are vendor platforms just an amalgam of acquired, partnered, and separately developed technologies, or do they represent a cohesive collection of agile SOA infrastructure that supports the widest range of SOA capabilities? This report aims to identify SOA platform vendors and help make the evaluation using the above criteria.

Service-Oriented Data Access

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources and data to meet the changing needs of the business. Implementing SOA depends upon the IT organization being able to build interoperable, robust, reusable, and composable Services that abstract the underlying application functionality and data in the organization. To put this building block vision of SOA into practice requires a solid technical foundation, which includes a persistence layer that facilitates interaction with heterogeneous data sources that store and provide the structured and unstructured information that the enterprise runs upon.

The key to enabling SOA with such a persistence layer, in turn, depends upon abstracting access through data access technology. Technologies such as JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET play an integral role in the design and development of a SOA Data Services strategy. With best-of-breed data access technology in place, the organization stands a good chance of succeeding with their SOA efforts. If an organization drops the ball on data access, however, it’s unlikely the Services will exhibit the key building block characteristics the organization needs to meet their agility requirements.

Why SOA Governance Must Start at Development Time

Now that SOA is moving from the planning to the project levels, there is a clear need to manage SOA’s assets, as well as maximize its key values: Agility and reuse. Thus, the use of a well-defined and well-implemented SOA governance system is critical to the success of SOA. Choosing the right governance system requires that you carefully consider specific attributes of the enterprise domain, including an inventory of the major SOA resources such as data, Services, and processes, as well as interactions and dependencies, and how all relate to the notions of policy management, service agreements, and security. Clearly, these interrelationships are so complex and far reaching that a SOA governance system is an absolute necessity.

So, how do you select and implement a governance system? There are a few key things to consider as you define and build your SOA, and clear steps you must follow to achieve success. In this paper we’ll take a look at the concept of SOA governance, as well as the steps needed to implement governance within your SOA problem domain.

Reinventing OSS with SOA & Federated Data

Written by ZapThink analysts Tony Baer and Jason Bloomberg.

Over the past decade, technology and market forces have driven convergence across the telecommunications sector, with barriers to entry being eroded at an ever increasing pace. The “triple play” and “multi-play” service bundles that include voice, video, and data services are symptoms of an industry that is rapidly evolving from its highly regulated past. As technology has transformed the landscape, it has also transformed customer expectations. Yesterday, the network was the operator business. Today, the network is just a means to delivering customers the diverse experiences they demand.

JacobsRimell has correctly perceived the change in the industry, and has developed a next generation Operations Support System (OSS) that shifts the focus from the network to customer. It does so with an identity-based federated data model and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices that enable operators to refocus their business on their customers, reduce lead time for introducing new offerings, and promote process quality and consistency by abstracting fulfillment and customer care from the Services that are necessary to support it.