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Traditional software architectures are increasingly under pressure from growing enterprise demands. An IT solution that brings in a high degree of business agility is the SOA. It brings in a flexible IT environment that helps create a highly scalable IT architecture. As enterprises struggle to arrive at tangible and intangible RoIs from their IT spends, can technology concepts like SOA capture the minds of CIOs? The answer would be: yes, if we go by a Yankee Group study. Out of the 473 decision makers it surveyed, close to 75% said they would invest in SOA. Some analysts also point out that SOA is not a mere IT decision, it is seen as a critical business enabler.

SOA Unplugged
Doing a due diligence on an emerging technology like SOA and putting in place a deployment roadmap is indeed a challenging task for any enterprise CIO. The management wants more business agility, and at the same time looks at RoI on every penny spent on ITthis is clearly a dilemma every CIO faces. If you are a CIO and looking at SOA deployments, and are not sure about the benefits, looking at SOA deployments will help. Take the case of Charles Schwab, the worlds leading financial firm, which has embraced the standards-based architecture. By deploying SOA, Charles Schwab has eliminated the IT barrier, as processes are no longer tied with specific sets of technologies. By virtue of SOA Charles Schwab can now change customer centric processes without disturbing the underlying technologies, the same applies to back-end also.

Any successful IT deployment lies in closely looking at the successful proof-points that technology has created, that will help in understanding the merits of the technology. In the case of SOA, it is the integration framework that binds internal and external services to create a solution. Just as a storage area network provides virtualized storage that is not dependant on any specific computer, SOA provides virtualized application functionality that is not dependant on any specific block of computer code. Experts say that SOA, instead of focusing on different applications that reside on different computers, emphasizes on business services that represent several different underlying applications.

If we look at the benefits of SOA, the biggest one probably lies in the enterprises ability to migrate functionality into a centralized middle-tier environment thus creating a centralized enterprise components layer of business logic sitting in front of the core systems. The business components in the enterprise layer are product agnostic and can be readily standardized across product systems, with little customization.

SOA and Web Services
Some of the CIOs confuse SOA with web services but analysts point out the difference. For instance, Web services are loosely coupled, executable application components linked dynamically over the network with open standards that are deployed by using XML standards like WSDL or SOAP or UDDI. SOA on the other hand is an approach to loosely coupled protocol independent standards based distributed computing where software resources available on the network are considered as services. In a typical SOA environment, services are published by applications and these services are offered as standards based interfaces. SOA can be termed as the logical evolution of Web services.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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