The SOA Challenge

Service-oriented architecture is becoming commonplace, but ask someone to define the technology, and get ready for a long, complicated explanation.

Typically, a solution provider would address a customer project by proposing the implementation of software applications and the addition or replacement of hardware. But solution providers implementing SOA focus on IT processes and management, often using existing technology in the customer’s environment for much of the work rather than pushing new products.

The implementation of SOA touches various aspects of a business, potentially causing disruptions and reaching beyond a company network to third-party systems that interact with the business. As such, SOA is tough to explain to customers who are used to IT projects that handle a specific technology area as opposed to the more horizontal approach of SOA, industry and channel experts say.

“SOA is a hard sell, as it involves an intimate understanding of both the client’s business and their IT landscape,” said Srinivas Padmanabhuni, head of SOA research at Infosys Technologies, a global provider of IT services and consulting. “Success in selling SOA depends on a firm’s ability to show customers value, both in terms of the benefits they can realize through SOA and the value the IT company delivers when deploying SOA.”

Challenges notwithstanding, SOA has become integral to IT environments at some federal government agencies, leading software companies and major integrators. And if that’s not enough proof of SOA’s widespread adoption, consider this: It is now finding a home in midmarket environments.

What it is

What is soa? broadly speaking, it is an architecture that enables the relatively affordable creation, use and reuse of business processes, packaged as services, allowing all applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.

The services include applications that can be used by different groups of people inside and outside a company for greater flexibility and uniformity—often referred to as “business agility.”

For example, a banking customer should be able to provide personal information to open an online checking, savings or individual retirement account—instead of redundantly providing such information for each account. A shipping company making price adjustments may make the changes in the effected systems much more efficiently as a result of better communication between the systems.

SOA uses Web services, which are loosely coupled application components created with open-source standards. A loosely coupled architecture enables developers to create applications that fit into heterogeneous environments both inside and outside a client’s business.

Service orientation is not a new idea in IT departments, said Kevin Kane, vice president of the Composer solutions division at Unify, a provider of application development, data management and SOA solutions.

“This idea has been around for many years, though only in limited proprietary forms until recently,” Kane said. “What has changed the picture has been the arrival of key standards, particularly Web services, that can interact effectively with one another.”