Securing Optimal RoI Through SOA

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is in the nascent stages of adoption in
India.

When compared globally, while the Indian market is aware of SOA as a concept
there still exist many hurdles in the way of its mass acceptance.

Explaining the concept of SOA, Peter Coffe, Director-Platform Research,
Salesforce said, "SOA is a combination of architecture and culture. What it does
is that it redesigns the approach of the system around the idea that the IT
system portfolio grants service requests to other portfolios instead of
individual applications monitoring their own set of data."

One of the basic governing principles of SOA is that it attempts to package
functionality and interoperable services as a means for software module
integration. "Today, Web 2.0 and SOAs are among the top issues of concern for IT
architects and executives. Both are poised for exponential growth over the next
few years, due to their flexibility, cost effectiveness, and ease of
integration. Each technology creates highly distributed composite applications
that unite components or subsystems to form higher-level functional systems or
target applications," said Prem Nithin, Sr Technical Consultant, Cisco, India
and SAARC.

SOA separates functions into distinct units, or services, which are then made
accessible over a network. The users can then combine and reuse these units in
the production of applications. These services communicate with each other by
passing data from one to another, or by coordinating an activity between two or
more services. "SOA is an architectural philosophy that does not specifically
require or align itself with any particular technology set. It is focused on
providing a tighter affiliation between business process and IT architecture in
a modular fashion, with the goal of providing business agility, flexibility, and
cost-effectiveness in long-term use," Nithin added.

Being an architectural model, SOA relies on service-orientation, exposing the
functionality of services via interfaces that other applications and services
can read.

Primary Applicants

The model, as such has found its principle use in the realm of Web computing
and development with substantial growth and compatibility in the usage of the
more recent languages like C# and implementing the same in the domain of .net
framework and java platforms. "During the last year, we have seen that the SOA
spending has gone down. This happened because companies reduced focus on the
roll out of enterprise-level SOA firstly because of an absence of clarity in
terms of who has to fund SOA. Secondly, business users not having understood the
value of SOA, as it has been considered as a technology issue," said
Krishnakumar N Menon, GM-BPM SOA Services, Wipro Technologies.

SOA enables development of applications by combining loosely-coupled and
interoperable services, inter operating between themselves on an underlying
platform or programming language. SOA-based systems can therefore function
independently of development technologies and platforms. Also, it can support
integration and consolidation activities within complex enterprise systems, but
SOA does not specify or provide a methodology or framework for documenting
capabilities or services.

Benefits of SOA

Network architects and webmasters believe that SOA can help businesses
respond more quickly and cost-effectively to changing market-conditions, as the
architecture promotes reuse at a macro or service level rather than a micro or
class level. It can also simplify interconnection to and reusage of existing
legacy assets. Acceptability of SOA should grow since it propagates the
reusability of business services. Under the architecture a developer can take an
already working code, enhance and take it forward to adapt to newer demands that
businesses make. The benefit of reusing application and codes grows dramatically
as more and more business services are built over a period of time, and are
thereby incorporated into different applications.

"Cisco's service virtualization and mediation capabilities allow
organizations to achieve the levels needed to meet the RoI goals for SOAs. The
Cisco ACE XML gateway can mediate between disparate credential, protocols, and
data formats through data transformation.

With the Cisco solution's industry-leading extensibility, XML gateway has the
reach to support you wherever your SOA initiative takes you," Nithin added.

In an SOA environment, all that a requesting application needs to know is the
public interface of the given set. The functions of an application or system
thus become dramatically easier to access. So integrating applications and
systems can be much simpler. The SOA vision of interaction between clients and
loosely coupled services imply widespread interoperability. The primary
objective for clients and services is to communicate and understand each other,
irrespective of the operating platform. Because of the nature of loose coupling
of services in an SOA environment, applications that use these services tend to
scale more easily than applications in a more tightly coupled environment. This
is due to lesser dependencies between the requesting application and the
services it use. The relatively limited interaction required for a client to
communicate with a service, allows applications that use these services to scale
without putting a heavy communication load on the network.

"To achieve an higher RoI on SOA infrastructure, first there has to be a
higher degree of standardization in the infrastructure. This allows the
infrastructure to be virtualized to drive the higher utilization. This will also
result in additional savings in the form of power, real estate and so on to
drive higher RoI," Menon elucidated.

The most important aspect of deploying SOA architecture is cost efficiency
that it brings for the organization. Customized solutions and applications are
costly to build and integrate since they require extensive analysis, development
time, and effort. So normally the CIOs tend to think hard before allocating the
monetary spending. Also, these applications have higher maintenance cost since
they are tightly coupled, so that changes in one component of the integrated
solution require changes in other components. The benefit that SOA has over
customized solutions is that the services here are loosely coupled and
applications that use these services are not very costly to maintain, plus there
exists the added benefit of easier extension capabilities.

It is often perceived that SOA is an architectural evolution rather than a
revolution comprising the 'best practices' of the ancestral software
architectures before it. "The general premise of service orientation is to
decompose functional processes into modular services or sub-processes that can
be served by IT systems, to optimally support one or more higher-level business
processes. By popular choice and industry alignment, Web service protocols such
as XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) currently serve as the
standard," Nithin explained.

An indirect benefit of SOA is that it involves dramatically simplified
testing, where services are autonomous, stateless, with fully documented
interfaces, and separate from the cross-cutting concerns of the implementation.

Market overview

"Some of the business applications that have emerged from SOA include online
banking, shopping and other services that are readily accessible on the
Internet. From an enterprise perspective, the technology provides even greater
benefits. As Web 2.0 and SOA gain traction, CIOs and IT managers must decide
where best to employ these technologies and how to optimize the performance of
composite applications," Nithin said.

"The slowdown has reduced the number of discretionary spending. In some cases
(cross Line-Of-Business level), SOA roll-outs need upfront investment to realize
the long term-return. This kind of investments have been reduced due to slowdown
which had direct impact on the SOA market," Menon added. Additionally, it has
been noticed that the organizations which had an SOA infrastructure and roadmap
did not face major setbacks in terms of adoption.

Commenting over the same, Coffe added, "Virtualization of the datacenter has
received much attention over the recent years. However, there has not been so
much concern for SOA as a scope for new investment."

Prospects

The advancement in cloud computing technology is becoming an enabler to
build business services across industry segments. It is also enabling increased
adoption in the SMB market as well

and datacenter virtualization.

"SOA as a concept has been tremendously successful but not under its own name
or brand concept. Instead, the label of SOA, in my observation has been attached
to an older way of doing the same thing amounting to what we call as SOA," Coffe
commented.

Discussing the emerging trends in the SOA space Menon opined, "Customers are
also increasingly adopting SOA appliances to improve performance and security.
Enterprise caching technologies are also becoming popular for object caching to
improve end-user experience, performance and reduce mainframe million
instructions per second (MIPS). SOA is slowly adopting event-driven

architecture rather than the old request/response style."

With the coming in of the global slowdown, IT budgets and spending have
reduced. However, now with economy showing signs of revival the scenario seems
brighter as the CIOs are expecting hike in IT spending. Sharing the same views,
Coffe said, "There has been tremendous pressure on IT organizations to focus
their efforts to directly improve the bottomline. The CIOs are no longer
confined in the realm of technology, but are now expected to bring in near term
benefits in form of cost reduction." It is apparent that securing a good RoI
implies a growth in SOA acceptability.

Also, Menon said, "Growth opportunity for SOA is with the business
transformation area. When such transformations take place, organizations tend to
create IT capabilities from a long-term perspective with significant value
enhancement. SOA is a key enabler for the same. Another opportunity area is
creating the industry-specific models like processes, services and data models,
and driving their adoption. This provides a good opportunity for system
integrators in SOA market," he concluded.

Avishek Rakshit

avishekr@cybermedia.co.in