SOA - Service Orientation Applied

Much has been made of hyped technology waves over the past few decades as the effectiveness of the technologies at the frontier of each wave. Is the current wave of SOA any different? Will SOA be able to bridge, if not obliterate the gap between business and IT? The real question is whether there is actual gap between the desired expectations and the delivered value of SOA?

Read on...

Much has been made of hyped technology waves over the past few decades as the effectiveness of the technologies at the frontier of each wave. Is the current wave of SOA any different? Will SOA be able to bridge, if not obliterate the gap between business and IT? The real question is whether there is actual gap between the desired expectations and the delivered value of SOA?

It might be too early to make judgement on this front, because as a mainstream trend in distributed computing it is a fairly new phenomenon. However  some thoughts on overcoming the key challenges and pitfalls in SOA adoption as  outlined below are elucidated in the editorial of SETLabs briefings Vol 1, 2007, on Service Oriented Architecture, pages 95-99.

Key points include:

Adopt a meet-in-the middle approach with a top down business services with a view to automating business processes, while leverage fine grained design from existing systems.

Governance is best thought through the life cycle right from design through organizational change through runtime monitoring..

Read more at http://www.infosys.com/technology/setlabs-briefings-soa.pdf 

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

While web 2.0 is all about rich user interfaces, and participative architectures. SOA is all about standards based integration, and standards based IT interfaces? Where do they meet?

Read on..

Web 2.0 can be conceptualized as a key enterprise computing trend, complementing SOA. It is now possible to envisage a rich ecosystem of interoperable business services, connected through common interfaces. Web 2.0 can be thought of as enabler of rich service consumer ecosystem for SOA, with capabilites for collaboration, orchestration, customization, context sensitive variation for services etc.

Definitely this is a sweet spot worth exploring .. See the detailed analysis in the SETlabs briefings Vol 2, 2007 Issue on Implementing SOA  for details of this.. Download the article "Exploring complementarities between Web 2.0 and SOA" by Shaurabh Bharti, Abhishek Chatterjee and Geo Phillips , at (http://www.infosys.com/technology/toc-implementing-soa.asp )

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a flattened world, the organization leverages its global supply chain to effectively source the best capabilities in the most cost effective fashion.  Similarly, in enterprise IT, SOA provides the essential capabilities to have the global supply chain of technology and computing capabilities. The global supply chain helps to source the best of breed capabilities.

Contrary to the notion of big systems, monoliths or all in one-systems, SOA proposes a modular sourcing approach. Instead of making investment on one big technology or one big product and committed to that for years to come, enterprises are contemplating to adopt modular solutions with smaller investments, with faster time to market and eventually replaceable with latest technologies with out huge reinvestments. Success stories related to Software as a Service (SaaS) providers such as salesforce.com or Amazon marketplace, shows the early signs of such flexible solutions. In addition to leveraging external providers, enterprise IT organizations are expanding the meaning of [internal] ‘shared services’ from conventional candidates such as finance and HR systems to essential [common] capabilities of  identity and access management, content management, document generation and so on.
  
It might be the same reason of ‘flattening’ that makes the ERP product vendors to invest on SOA e.g. SAP’s ESA or Oracle’s Fusion. It makes the ERP solutions much more modular, loosely coupled between various process implementations, easily customizable, incrementally adoptable and easy to integrate in a best of breed scenario. It is worth mentioning, especially considering ERP vendors’ such as SAP’s steer towards middle market where incremental adoption can be very attractive.

Posted by Binooj Purayath at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)