Not too long ago, IT organizations turned to service-oriented architecture (SOA) primarily as a way to integrate enterprise applications. But now large companies are using SOA to create components that can be combined and reused as services across multiple applications.
This makes application updates easier and faster, reduces development time, improves service to customers and partners, and saves money.
It's still SOA, just all grown up.
"You don't get high marks anymore for simply writing Web service wrappers around existing applications," says Hamesh Yadav, lead systems architect at Wells Fargo & Co. in San Francisco and co-chair of The Open Group's service-oriented infrastructure working group. "SOA is more problem-based now."
While this broader use of SOA does lead to management challenges, including the need for "building in governance so you have a way to register and share services," he says, "the end result is a reduction of complexity" by making things more interoperable.
At Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., in Springfield, Mass., the SOA project now incorporates around 40 services, including distribution management, premium collections, customer information management, new business and underwriting.
These services integrate applications across business units, each of which markets different products. Instead of replacing an existing application wholesale, business units select an appropriate combination from the company's array of shared services," says Kinam-Peter Kim, manager of enterprise SOA at MassMutual.
"To us, SOA is not a technology. It is an approach to modernize our business -- an approach to create an adaptable enterprise," Kim explains.
Well-designed SOA services are reusable for both business process automation and systems integration. For example, MassMutual's shared business functions, such as security, are placed into repositories. These shared functions conform to the IT department's governing policies, which in turn determine which applications use the shared services.
When the company was considering revamping its SOA approach in 2007, the IT team realized that instead of changing the architecture model, they could instead use one model across all business units.
"We asked questions like, what does SOA mean for our business?" says Don Carten, assistant vice president of enterprise technology at MassMutual. "We thought about the approach, what funds to lay out, practices, what services do we use. Then we built a team that was core to the program... and built out the services using well-known standards."
SOA: Broadening and deepening
"SOA is moving into the mainstream, where it becomes a component of other things," says Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "Companies define Web services, write the code and then deliver the [application] service," he says.
He uses the telecommunications industry to illustrate the concept. SOA is the lingua franca that bridges all of a telco's services -- landline, Internet, mobile, television and more -- so they can be delivered in a unified manner on a carrier's Web site. This setup could even be extended to retail outlets, where it would enable salespeople to see details of various packages on a monitor.
With SOA, all of that could be more tightly integrated, allowing a company to market, provision and create bills for combined and bundled services from all sources.
Each of those systems could run on different underlying technologies, Gilpin explains. "Landlines might live on a mainframe, while mobile services are running on a Java platform. SOA is the enabler, and this lowers cost."
Similarly, in the financial services industry, SOA could enable banks to process loans faster or offer speedier service with fewer hassles, he adds.
Using SOA in just about every app
At Cigna Corp., SOA evolved differently than it did at MassMutual, but it yielded similar results. The Philadelphia-based health insurer got started with SOA around 2001, jumping into the technology wholeheartedly. While many other user organizations were testing Web services at the departmental level, Cigna rolled out SOA for large-scale, companywide systems. Deployments included new call center software and a consumer accounts-management application.
"We built out the existing hardware and software infrastructure, and now there are pieces of SOA in nearly every mission-critical application," says Stephen Bergeron, senior director of architecture at Cigna.
SOA usage growing
On the whole, companies are using more SOA -- but it's not universal happiness, according to a recent survey.
Enterprises of all sizes using SOA or that will by year-end - 68%
Enterprises of all sizes increasing SOA usage - 52%
Enterprises of all sizes cutting back on SOA - 1%
Enterprises 'struggling' to get the SOA benefits they expected - 18%
Enterprises not planning on using SOA - 32%
Forrester Research, Inc., based on 2,227 respondents in the fourth quarter of 2009.
The company relies on SOA for process orchestration, data services and business services, among other things, he says.
Rethinking service delivery
Cigna has rethought -- from both a business and an IT perspective -- how different business units will access and use shared applications, Bergeron explains.
Because many business applications have overlapping features, it's important to define upfront the function that each service is intended to fulfill, and to govern each one's use accordingly, Bergeron says. Doing so will ensure that technology is used appropriately. Taking that step is "especially important as SOA is adopted across the enterprise," he adds.
Today, Cigna's shared-services registry and repository promote greater data sharing. The registry contains information about which applications are integrated with the SOA, and which reusable code each uses. The repository stores the reusable code.
The use of services for mission-critical applications represents a shift. It is different from an application made up of services, or one that uses services that are separate from the SOA, Forrester's Gilpin explains.
The use of SOA typically expands in this manner: Companies first use Web services for small, one-off projects and then, as those smaller initiatives succeed, start deploying SOA across the entire enterprise.
To be successful, such an expansion needs to be accompanied by a shift in thinking about what SOA requires from a business-process standpoint.
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