Service Oriented Architecture
C. Cooper
747 words
A Whole New Mindset
Service-oriented architecture concept promises to transform IT.
You've probably been through this ordeal at one time or another. You call a
poorly run customer service center and are forced to repeat your name, account number
and problem over and over as you're bounced from rep to rep.
A similar scenario is encountered by many business applications all day, every
day. While software doesn't feel frustration, IT managers certainly do as they recognize
the inefficiencies of poorly integrated applications. In a recent study cited in an IBM
white paper, application integration was ranked a top priority by more than one-third of
CIOs.
Consider a bank that has grown and evolved according to customer needs. Legacy
teller applications and ATM software may still be in use when the bank adds Web-based
self-service tools. Each of these applications performs the same basic functions —
providing account information and handling common transactions — on the same data.
However, each was developed separately and works independently of the other.
The bank's IT department has to maintain three separate sets of code, potentially
on three different platforms. Adding new functionality to any of these applications
requires consideration of the impact on the other applications and data.
Service with a Smile
How does an organization eliminate such repetitive functionality and, more
importantly, ensure that data flows freely, efficiently and accurately throughout all
applications? It's an elusive goal that has eluded IT departments for many years.
However, that goal is coming closer to reality with the concept of the service-oriented
architecture (SOA).
An SOA is a set of principles and practices for sharing, reusing and orchestrating
business logic represented as services or components. These services can be securely
accessed by any application or platform within the organization. In the banking example,
the service "get account balance" could be utilized by teller, ATM and online applications
without writing and maintaining separate code for each application.
The cost savings and efficiencies to be gained by this approach are huge. The IT
department is saved the time and effort of maintaining multiple sets of code. Software
migrations, upgrades, backups and other tasks are simplified. More importantly, after
implementing an SOA, an organization can experience greater re-use of IT assets, faster
delivery of value to the business and greater adaptability to support ongoing change.
"Making changes to applications and extending their ability to interact with other
systems is increasingly complex and costly," said Nick Gall, senior vice president and
principal analyst, META Group. "As companies move to service-enable their existing
enterprise resources, the ability to rapidly compose, orchestrate and expose these services
will define how well IT can meet the needs of the business. Building on a foundation that
easily and cost-effectively converges these capabilities should be a high priority for any
IT organization that is seriously looking at moving toward a service-oriented
architecture."
Untangling the Web
The SOA concept is not new. More than 10 years ago, the Common Object
Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) was introduced to integrate applications
regardless of platform. However, integration problems persisted due to the growing
complexity of IT architectures and the lack of a clear standard object model.
SOA holds greater promise thanks to Web services and the availability of a
mature, pervasive global network infrastructure. Web services utilize Extensible Markup
Language (XML), which allows for the identification and sharing of data across
platforms, and Java, which is a platform-neutral programming language, to deliver
information and functionality via the World Wide Web. The result is a lower-cost, open
standards-based solution that provides more security, reliability, flexibility, control and
reusability than previous patchwork approaches.
Still, it's important to remember that SOA is not the same as Web services — it's a
framework upon which organization-wide application integration can be built. While
many smart companies are using Web services to improve the way they do business,
experts say organizations have even more to gain by changing the way they think about
their infrastructure. According to Forrester Research, CIOs that adopt the SOA discipline
are positioning their firms for better business agility through more advanced Web
services and a tenfold improvement in integration costs.
"Every company needs a cheaper and easier way to give their customers and
suppliers the information and services they need," said Ted Schadler, principal analyst at
Forrester. "It's what the Internet promised but failed to immediately deliver. While basic
Web service technology has helped tremendously, firms need more. What they need is a
full stack of infrastructure to make it easy to build secure, reliable services that a
customer can easily use."
Sidebar:
157 words
Regulatory Compliance "Architecture"
Can Be Built Using Existing Tools
Many organizations are boosting their IT budgets in order to retool applications
and networks to meet the requirements of complex federal regulations, such as the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
However, experts at Gartner say that a regulatory compliance "architecture" can help
pave the way to compliance without new technology investments.
Regulations are diverse but they all tend to mandate business process change,
documentation and reporting. These common approaches allow businesses to develop an
architecture that improves their response to any regulation.
"Enterprises today are struggling to deal with a complex regulatory environment
full of costly unfunded mandates, while still managing tight budgets," said Rich Mogull,
research director for Gartner. "Implementing a compliance architecture with an
enterprise's current technology can help reduce the cost of regulatory compliance."
By 2006, public companies that do not adopt a regulatory compliance architecture
will spend 50 percent more annually to achieve Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, according to
Gartner.