Hot Technologies: SOA: DNA of Business Integration

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