What Are the Benefits of Adopting a SOA?
SOAs make it easier to integrate the "everything but the kitchen sink" IT environments found in most companies. "That's the big value of a SOA; it works very well in heterogeneous environments," says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, a Web services consultancy. Developers don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time writing new lines of code to connect applications. Instead, they can use standard protocols, such as Web services. And large chunks of SOA code are reusable, reducing development costs. A SOA takes your legacy investments - your SAP, Siebel, Oracle and the like - and makes them all play nicely (and more cheaply) together.
"That's the sweet spot for SOA - leveraging your existing portfolio," says Tim Bass, president of Silk Road, an IT consultancy. You don't need to rip and replace those systems with brand-new ones. By identifying the capabilities of existing systems and leveraging them, you maximize the value of your IT investments while minimizing your risk, he says. Also, building services - for example, using simple object access protocol (SOAP) and Web services description language (WSDL) - not only smooths the internal integration process, it also lets customers and business partners share information more easily across company firewalls.
Another benefit of a SOA is that it can lead to a better dialogue between the CIO and line-of-business execs by forcing IT workers to think in terms of business - not technical - architectures. If a business wants to build a better inventory control system, for example, the operations folks can hook up with the IT architects and talk about the best way to design it based on business flows and how best to meet the needs of the business. And implementing that design, which often involves large-scale integration, becomes a less gruesome task.
For that dialogue to work, businesspeople have to think about the best ways to run their business. What processes do I need to put in place to best accommodate my customers? How can I improve my level of customer service? By exposing and sharing information across once-siloed applications, companies can extract more business performance data in real time, improving business intelligence. There's a whole new level of responsiveness companies can exploit through a common architecture, says Dana Gardner, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "If there's a hurricane on the East Coast, [resulting in a] great need to move plywood from another part of the country, I can be responsive in real time," he says. "I have information about what's going on in my business that I didn't have before." In a perfect SOA world, companies improve their ability to adapt to changing business requirements and shifting market conditions.
Finally, the benefits of easier integration and increased agility lead to greater ROI. Buskard says he's achieved a 200 per cent return on his SOA investment. One of AXA Financial's most popular SOA-based services is Get Client, in which any front-end app can issue a command and, after probing around the legacy systems, come back with a complete picture of a customer's investments. Buskard says that Get Client is one example of how AXA achieves its ROI - developers design services to be generic enough that they can work with an array of front-facing systems, reducing development time and freeing developers to spend more time on business solutions. In addition, IT workers can easily incorporate new technologies into the SOA, reducing risk and expense while speeding development of new applications.
What Role Does Web Services Play in a SOA?
First, it's important to note that a SOA does not require Web services; and Web services can be deployed without a SOA.
There are those, however, who believe that building a SOA using Web services is the ideal approach. Gartner's Thompson belongs to that camp. He cautions, however, that users must implement Web services properly to create a SOA.
If done correctly, he notes, a Web service is little more than a SOA that uses SOAP and WSDL.
Buskard, on the other hand, has built his company's SOA without Web services, as none of his internal or external customers are asking for them at this point (though he's keeping his ear to the ground in case they do later on). Instead, he uses IBM's WebSphere MQ as a messaging and integration layer to connect legacy systems with his front-end apps.
This works in tandem with Candle's PathWAI suite, which helps optimize WebSphere MQ by monitoring its performance.
Jon Johnson, chief engineer for Northrop Grumman Mission Systems of the Colorado Springs Engineering Organization, has also built a SOA, based on a publish-subscribe system (see "A SOA Glossary", left) without Web services. He's deployed Java Message Service as a messaging layer on top of a Web server and an application server, and uses the enterprise service bus from Sonic Software to help with integration and data movement. Johnson says that his services are designed like Web services, only without the Web services interface.
One of the major benefits of the SOA, he says, is that the right data gets sent to the right person or application. For example, when a user logs on using an ID, the system knows who the user is and pushes only the data - for example, maps and task lists - that the person is authorized to see.
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