Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in IT, operations and practices that have redefined corporate business processes. Employing IT and redesigning processes, companies have eliminated certain tasks and integrate others that were conducted in compartments.
This has led to more efficient, cross-functional tasks between departments inside the company and with customers, vendors' partners. The monetary gains were anywhere between a few millions to billions of dollars complemented with increased customer satisfaction. IT departments of each corporate achieved this in a proprietary form unique in itself, difficult to replicate or integrate.
But in the era of Mergers and Acquisition (M&A), consolidations and need for on-demand computing, the above design converted itself as an expensive and difficult way to share, consolidate and change processes. This led to duplication of activities, each unit continuing to do hundreds of non-core activities, spending exorbitant amounts to support them. This is the wall that most IT departments hit, difficult to penetrate and overcome.
Then came Service Oriented Architecture, SOA in short, a relatively new way of designing and deploying software that permits sharing of capabilities using an Internet/Intranet.
Some of the corporate scenarios ideal for SOA adoption could be classified as follows:
Scenario A - A big-to-medium enterprise with multiple departments, each having its own software, exchanges cross-functional data which is critical in a manual and semi-automatic process. This being very expensive, time consuming and error prone leads to loss of productivity. Moreover, software in each department being monolithic, a small break in one would bring the whole system to standstill. The only option would be to replace the entire system with additional cost.
Scenario B - A company when merges/acquires another should be able to acquire, exchange and use business data among them to realize the benefits of the merger. The challenge in front of them is to integrate the two IT departments with different, proprietary and in-house developed legacy systems and make them work together.
Scenario C - A large enterprise which has developed a legacy system over a period of time is faced with high maintenance costs. Switching over to a new system also involves high input costs that could pose a huge deterrent to the company's plans.
Many companies who have found themselves in one of the above mentioned scenarios have converted potential disaster into windfall. Take the case of Microsoft, they invested USD 1.25 million in a SOA test project and saved more than USD 3 million on annual maintenance cost on one set of IT systems. (Source - Harvard Business Review, June 2008).
So, how does SOA achieve this? SOA provides guidelines that allow software developers to re-engineer legacy code (or design new systems) into stand-alone chunks of computer code, each specifying the critical outcomes, performance metrics and interfaces between a discrete activity and other services. When software is re-designed or re-architected this way and placed on the Internet or Intranet, anyone using SOA (another business unit, another software, client software or supplier) can plug in or remotely access the same software.
SOA creates/re-engineers operations as plug & play modules so that each module can be easily integrated or replaced without affecting the working of any other dependent modules. This is integrated using web services which work seamlessly via internet.
SOA made little economic sense when it had to use proprietary or private network and methods of designing systems that had web services capabilities were still in infancy. With the advent of web services and Internet, SOA has made it possible for organizations to save millions of dollars every year.
An immediate advantage of adopting SOA is reduction in the costs of maintaining a monolithic legacy system. The data receding in one module is accessed from other module via the Internet, thereby reducing the need to transport data from one place to another. The modularization of operations and thus services helps companies identify and outsource non-core activities.
Re-architecting or re-engineering the legacy to SOA is easy and challenging at the same time. Easy because, the changes can be done in small steps, challenging because the changes require more profound operational and technological changes.
SOAization of a legacy starts with a complete analysis of the existing software, the monolithic software has to be broken down into modules. This exercise has to be done for each legacy system, and duplications noted each module has to be described based on the expected input, output and interfaces.
This can be further classified as primary, shared, shifted and automated, once identified companies need to apply SOA. This is known as business capability analysis and has to be done with an eye as to how to re-use the legacy code to derive maximum benefit. Hence, SOA is not a package to be bought and replaced but a method of converting existing monolithic legacy code to plug & play mode via web service and Internet.
According to Gartner, more than half of the mission critical systems companies built in 2007 were based on SOA principles, and it predicts the figure will exceed 80 percent by 2010. However adopting this new model requires a new mindset and a way of understanding the enormous benefits it brings to companies adopting them.
SOA & Cloud Computing India 2009 ? Get close to cutting-edge technologies
Like it or not, the DNA of IT is changing. Thanks to economic slowdown and cuts in IT budget, CIOs have to go lean and ensure good returns on IT spending. They have come under pressure to change their traditional approach to IT development and seriously explore technologies and approaches such as Cloud, SaaS, SOA, Lean IT, Green technologies and so on.
Developers, architects and other IT professionals have also come under pressure to adapt to the changing IT landscape. They have to rethink the tools of their trade, the platforms they use, get familiar with emerging approaches and frameworks to stay relevant. There is one conference which offers them a front row seat to the rapidly changing IT world.
Business Technology presents Third Annual Edition of SOA & Cloud Computing India 2009 Conferences, 15th October at Bangalore.
The international conference is designed to give progressive executives and developers a ringside view of the current developments in the emerging critical technologies. It will feature technical sessions from leading industry players of the Cloud ecosystem - the infrastructure firms, the platform providers, and application developers.
SOA India 2009 caters to the need of Indian Enterprise IT community of CIOs, CTOs, Management, IT directors, IT managers, IT architects, Network and Infrastructure specialists, Project Managers, Project Leaders, and Software Architects.
If you are responsible for business optimization, designing, developing and/or implementing your organization's IT strategy, join us this year for an unbiased source of insight, and expertise from the top experts to ensure the success of your initiatives.
To avail early bird discounts or for more information Call +91 080 41124392/93 or visit conference website www.soaindia.com.
In continuation to Part 2 of this series "How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond", Abhishek M. Gupta, VP (Technology) of Lime Spot Technology, in Part 3, discusses how to increase traffic by by "affiliate marketing". Read on...
del.icio.us
Digg.com
MyWeb
Newsvine.com
