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You're the CIO of a leading company. As your business is growing rapidly, you want to roll out new or upgraded applications for your customers. Your technology resources are directly dependent on the consumer demand, which is highly unpredictable in the current business scenario. But to conserve costs, you can't afford to deploy resources that are surplus or underutilized at any given point of time. Also, you can't infuse fresh investments for infrastructure to run new applications.

So the challenge before you is to devise a cost-effective strategy that meets the on-demand computing needs of information consumers-internal as well as external. At the same time, you want to meet your core business objectives by aligning your business processes with the IT infrastructure, while optimizing capital and operating costs. To deal with such a situation, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a viable option.

The Service Focus
In simple terms, SOA is a strategy that aims to organize enterprise IT resources around services rather than around applications. As a result, the users in a network gain access to applications as independent services that are delivered in a standardized way. Traditionally, enterprise applications are dependent on IT platforms and programming languages and are based mainly on point-to-point rigid architectures connecting applications with a predetermined set of users. On the other hand, SOA is about loosely coupled, interoperable services that work seamlessly irrespective of the operating platforms, giving flexibility to user organizations to deploy their resources as per information demand.

So instead of developing or deploying monolithic applications, companies can create repositories of reusable software components that form the building blocks for an application. As these components can be integrated using a service-based standard and are independent of underlying technologies, they can be used efficiently to quickly streamline business processes and to meet changing information-based customer expectations. Thus, the SOA methodology helps to transform conventional applications into business components termed as services. These services can range from business to technical-say, transaction posting to network communication.

In a SOA model, a service provider is connected with a service consumer through a service link. Web services, for example, use XML to provide the service link that facilitates delivery of Web services from service providers to diverse set of users who use disparate client systems for Web access. However, experts believe that conventional Web services don't depict an example of true SOA. While Web services are loosely coupled application components, linked with standards such as XML, SOA is a methodology to deliver loosely coupled, protocol independent computing based on specific standards. In the latter case, services are published by applications and are offered to meet various SLA objectives.

In today's e-business environment where customers and customer demands are increasing at a breakneck speed and sellers are struggling to cope with the mounting information demand levels, the use of SOA
becomes inevitable.

Enterprise Adoption
Though currently SOA is passing through an evolutionary phase, most businesses are showing an increasing interest in this technology model. According to a survey conducted by the Yankee Group-out of a sample of 473 enterprise decision makers, nearly three-fourth of them have planned to invest in SOA, starting in 2005. Today, the main driver for SOA adoption is the business demand that forces enterprise data centers to deliver more with minimal resources. And SOA is expected to be a critical business enabler rather than a mere IT tool.

Clearly, SOA holds more significance for enterprises that deal with mass consumers. This will not only help enterprises generate new revenue streams, but will also empower them to prevent 'churn'.

Now the onus is on the CIOs to implement SOA effectively. For this, they need to identify the enterprise areas where SOA could deliver immediate business benefits. Then they need to select the right technology that promises cost optimization and quicker returns. Since SOA has emerged as a prime requirement for corporate data centers, major technology vendors are offering myriad solutions to the buyers. They are even providing necessary handholding to enterprise users to understand and implement SOA.

While most solutions cover end-to-end enterprise requirements-from SOA assessment to SOA management-companies can select the solution keeping in view their current and future information needs.

Challenges
Enterprise CIOs need to understand SOA issues and implement it after analyzing the complete SOA lifecycle. In the legacy IT environments, for example, it may not be possible to extract service from an application. So SOA may not be the right option to replace legacy systems. While standards form the cornerstone for SOA, companies need to take a standards-based approach to implement SOA for internal as well as external service delivery.

Companies that want to embrace SOA should take a cautious approach-moving one step at a time from project to project-say, from sales order processing application to supplier payments. It may not be wise to take a revolutionary path to replace all applications at once with SOA. Rather, an evolutionary system that imparts learning as you grow can be beneficial.

No doubt, SOA is getting increasingly popular. Now it's time for enterprises to translate this popularity into profits. Only then SOA's full potential will be realized.

-Rakesh Raman
The author is an independent technology journalist

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