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While the fundamental objective of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to ensure that all software capabilities are delivered and consumed as services, enterprises can easily leverage this architecture to overhaul their application infrastructure. As a result, they can create an environment to develop business applications as a set of loosely coupled services. The need for the new approach is quite acute considering that the conventional development methods bind a business process tightly within a single application. This results in underutilization of IT resources in the off-peak situations and lack of resources, when the processing load is at its peak.

Also, in a traditional environment, applications exist as silos or there is a custom-built integration between them with hardly any service reuse option across the applications. “As each application has its own code for security, auditing, logging, and exception handling, it results in inefficient use of IT resources and delays in bringing new services to market,” observes Dhruv Singhal, head, Professional Services, BEA Systems.

The inefficient use of infrastructure also puts an avoidable cost burden on the user organization.

SOA Imperative
The SOA enables an enterprise to use the resources optimally, as it helps to create an application by assembling discrete application components. These are reusable components, which could be orchestrated to build different applications for diverse business processes. So, instead of allocating fixed IT resources for a particular application, enterprises can make do with these smaller application components, making the entire infrastructure highly flexible. That means the processing load of different application services will be dynamically shared among different IT resources, thereby, increasing IT productivity for the user company. And with more efficient use of IT, companies can expect enhanced business agility and profitability.

Since the SOA-based development approach involves the assembly of reusable application components, new applications can be developed quickly. Thus, for business expansion, companies can quickly offer new services to their customers, while opening up more revenue streams for themselves. “As SOA enables organizations to become more agile and respond faster to market conditions, they can launch newer and better services in lesser time and lower cost,” says Singhal of BEA Systems.

There are enormous benefits of the SOA-based modular development approach. It saves organizational resources that are required for developing, testing, and delivering new services. With these services, companies can easily streamline their business processes, making them more efficient, and responsive for internal users as well as external business associates, including buyers and suppliers. In fact, SOA serves as a business mapping mechanism that gives a clear view of the services in relation to the business processes. Since SOA is an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary one, it exploits the existing best practices in an enterprise to leverage technology for business gains. Thus, SOA empowers organizations to pull off more alignment between business and IT.

While application cost is a major irritant for corporate CIOs, they can optimize costs by utilizing SOA capabilities that get them freedom from expensive proprietary platforms, as companies can develop standards-based open solutions for various business needs. These solutions are technology-agnostic and thus, provide utmost scalability to user organizations, as they decide to use heterogeneous platforms. “With the variety of software vendors and solution providers each with their own merits and niche areas of excellence, a best-of-breed approach is unthinkable, unless there is a supporting technology framework that is vendor-agnostic and based on mainstream open standards that enables discrete components from various vendors to be plugged together to form configurable, composite applications,” says Akila Krishnakumar, CEO of SunGard's offshore services division. “The answer to these challenges is SOA.”

Applications and Benefits
Since SOA helps organizations achieve higher degree of data and application integration to handle diverse business processes, they can build a robust application infrastructure that adapts to changing business requirements dynamically and cost effectively. “Service implementations can be consolidated, made common, and reused across multiple service consumers. In most cases, developing a new application means designing only its presentation logic as a consumer of pre-existing services,” says Wesemann of SunGard. Companies can use SOA for a host of tasks that include administration services comprising auditing, security, and exception handling. The SOA-based data access services help organizations capture customer information from multiple backend systems.

The integration feature of SOA also becomes handy for companies to protect their investments made in legacy systems. The legacy system access services, for example, help them take updated information from legacy business information systems or enterprise resource planning systems. Moreover, shared business services make it easier for enterprises to add information about new customers across multiple backend systems. Companies can also create customer information portals for use among multiple portals, which can be done by using SOA-based presentation services. The SOA also enables companies to develop composite applications for personalization of services. As a result, enterprises can expect an array of business and technology advantages to valiantly face the fierce competition in the market.

“SOA's business benefits include the ability to roll out new applications and business processes more quickly to respond to changes in the marketplace,” says Singhal of BEA Systems. “Its IT benefits comprise reduced development time and costs, and decreased integration cost and complexity.” Further, companies can get rid of redundant data and systems, while leveraging existing IT investments.

With all these benefits, SOA has emerged as a new enterprise mantra to manage technology-led business growth. And it has all the strength to become an indispensable part of the enterprise tech strategy. So can CIOs ignore SOA? No, perhaps.

Rakesh Raman
The author is an independent technology journalist
mail@dqindia.com

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