by Tom Field
It's time for enterprises to rethink their IT infrastructure and consider implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is a collection of services that can communicate with each other, but aren't necessarily dependent on each other. Like the early years of spreadsheets and PCs, SOA is still "below the radar" for most organizations. However, it won't stay there. Its potential is too great, and it is likely to mature rapidly over the next few years. For instance, the senior principal engineer at a leading Web-based retailer believes SOA is destined to reshape IT on every level. "It's comparable to the dramatic transition in how things were manufactured and sold that occurred in the 19th century," when the transition from craft to mass manufacturing and distribution began, he says.
THE BOTTOM LINE ON SOA
According to Gartner's Massimo Pezzini, "Web services used to be a solution looking for a problem. With service-oriented architecture, it has finally found it." Gartner's view is that SOA will allow companies to reuse existing applications and data to create new business processes. That, in turn, makes the enterprise more agile and less locked-in to certain ways of doing business because applications can be changed faster and more easily. THE REAL BOTTOM LINE
SOA has the potential to deliver substantial savings. |
According to Gartner, Inc., the Stamford, Conn. - based think tank, SOA represents a crucial step in moving toward what Gartner calls the real-time enterprise, able to respond faster to changing business requirements and to react to events in real-time. "Until now," said Massimo Pezzini, vice president at Gartner, in a statement published in 2004, "service-oriented architectures have only been implemented by a few leading-edge enterprises due to high costs and the level of technical skill required." However, he observes, Web services are now making it both affordable and possible from a skills point of view. The open nature of Web services means that any bit of code can potentially be reused and shared as needed. In addition, consolidation of security technologies and maturing standards for Web services mean security is no longer a stumbling block. Gartner predicts SOA adoption will be a mainstream phenomenon in Global 2000 companies by 2007.
While the idea of SOA has been around for many years, it did not have much impact. Now, with the advent of Web services, there's a nearly complete correspondence between the goal of SOA and the means to implement it. In fact, the biggest difference between SOA and Web services is that the latter has usually been implemented point-to-point where there was a complete understanding of the infrastructure.
What's more, the potential for reuse means software costs could begin to drop. By reusing services, IT doesn't have to spend money to create the same functionality over and over again.
SOA can help with many other aspects of business, some of them not obvious at first glance. For instance, compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulatory mandates is easier with SOA because it provides a real-time view of who's accessing specific applications or data.
SOA also allows companies to be more agile by making it easier to change functionality to match business requirements, fosters information sharing, and discourages individuals and organizations from maintaining separate databases because resources are easier to share. But while SOA is exciting, there are factors that could slow its adoption. For IT organizations, there are cultural challenges in shifting away from traditional software paradigms. SOA requires contracts, policies, service level agreements, security, authentication, identity management, upgrades and governance.
