The Value Proposition for Service-Oriented Integration

Connecting systems both within the enterprise and among suppliers, partners, and customers is of critical importance to today’s enterprise. However, integration remains complex, expensive, and risky. The increasing movement toward data virtualization, B2B systems, and legacy reuse is driving a need to integrate dozens, if not hundreds of systems in a single environment. The end result is a tangled web of point-to-point integrations that becomes increasingly brittle over time. The costs for both maintaining and changing systems can become exorbitant, since changing requirements necessitates manual recoding of applications. Enterprises are thus faced with an integration problem that grows at a rapidly increasing rate.

Standards-based Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) built on Web Services interfaces enable a new approach to integration. Known as Service-Oriented Integration (SOI), this integration approach leverages open standards, loose coupling, and the dynamic description and discovery capabilities of Web Services to reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of integration. While SOAs have certainly been around for a while, and certainly users have been experimenting with point-to-point implementations of Web Services, it is the combination of Web Services and SOAs that is especially potent.

Targeted at companies who must contend with an overwhelming number of integration projects, this paper introduces the concept of SOI, how it improves upon previous integration methods, and identifies key elements that are required for an SOI solution. Furthermore, this paper explores the ROI and value metrics users can realize from SOI approaches, and when SOI approaches are applicable and useful.

SOA Tools and Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

Service-Oriented Management Technology Landscape

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.

Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.

Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.