ITAMAR ANKORION, DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING, EXPLAINS HOW SOA CAN GIVE ORGANIZATIONS A HEADSTART IN RESPONDING TO CHANGE
How an organization responds to change can determine its long-term success. Whether reacting to competitive pressures, proactively setting the agenda for others, identifying opportunities and threats, or re-aligning faster than the competition, organizations require agility to respond fast to changing circumstances.
As always, the reality is not as straightforward as one would hope. The IT systems that businesses rely upon are often complex and old; trying to change these systems to fit new corporate strategy can often be prohibitively difficult and costly – or at worst, impossible without completely ripping them out and starting again.
There is some good news. Modern methods of encapsulating existing as well as new deployments into re-usable ‘services’ could ensure that existing infrastructure does not represent a barrier to an organization’s agility and flexibility. When executed well, it could even provide the springboard for a business to become proactively agile, using its newfound corporate flexibility as a competitive advantage.
During recent years, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged and gained momentum as an approach to building more flexible and re-usable IT systems. It encourages and facilitates the alignment of IT assets into a set of ‘services’ that can be called upon or invoked, and together form the basis of the underlying business process. It also provides the flexibility required to adapt business processes and interactions rapidly to meet changing business requirements.
The adoption of SOA and its value to the enterprise is primarily due to the following three benefits:
- SOA promotes and enables business agility – SOA provides the ability to leverage existing application and data assets, and expose them using standards-based service level abstractions. By ‘wrapping’ new applications as well as legacy systems, into smaller more manageable service components, a more adaptable and re-configurable IT systems architecture is achieved. These loosely coupled services can be very quickly assembled (or ‘orchestrated’) and re-configured to create new business processes or change existing ones, as well as ‘composed’ to create new services and business applications. The speed of change that InFocus enables in order to align with new business requirements provides the agility companies increasingly need to remain competitive.
- SOA provides cost efficiencies and reduces total cost of ownership – Using SOA, ‘composite’ applications and business processes can be assembled from proven building blocks that are loosely coupled. Firms benefit from reduced maintenance costs by promoting reuse, reducing inter-service dependencies and making changes faster. In addition, the use of standard interfaces and common technologies lowers the overall cost of maintaining the environment as an organization can leverage the availability of standard skill sets existing within its workforce or readily available in the marketplace. Finally, using SOA provides seamless interoperability between different platforms and technologies by abstracting them, providing the organization with flexibility to choose the most cost-effective IT environment.
- SOA reduces the risk of changing or deploying new IT solutions – Change for change’s sake is not enough reason to undertake something new if that change introduces additional risk or errors. Using SOA, companies can improve quality of change, and reduce the risk of downtime and prolonged projects. This is because SOA is based on loosely-coupled services that can be tested and changed independently from each other. Furthermore, this approach of assembling services promotes incremental deployment, further reducing the risk associated with complex software development and integration projects.
Making existing software assets part of SOA
Organizations have two primary choices in turning existing assets into part of an SOA: service-enabling legacy applications and turning data assets into services.
Service-enabling legacy applications
Most enterprise applications are architected in a stove-piped manner, which means they are designed to run as a standalone application providing complete functions rather then components or services that can be used as building blocks. As companies create initiatives for building composite applications or orchestrating business processes, there is a need to plan and consider the efforts required for re-purposing existing applications and ‘service-enabling’ them.
To address these challenges, organizations can develop integration components as an IT development project, although this carries a lot of risk, requires domain expertise and skill-sets for both new and old technologies. Alternatively, they can use interfaces or APIs provided by the legacy system. Again, however, this depends on the legacy application and varies between more modern packaged applications that may already offer web services and older systems or homegrown applications that may not provide any APIs.
A more preferable option is to use integration software, such as the Attunity Integration Suite, to facilitate and simplify the integration with legacy systems and expose them as services. Such systems do require investment, but reduce complexity and risk and, perhaps most importantly, minimize time to market.
Turning data into services
Information needs to be accessible in the form of data services if SOA is to be used for corporate agility. The benefit of such services is that they provide a simple building block that hides the complexity of the underlying data sources, the location of the data and the rules that bring it together across potentially disparate data sources.
When considering the use of data services, some companies choose to code services from scratch, typically in .NET or Java. Alternatively, companies can use software for data and information integration that facilitates the process of defining such services.
The Attunity Integration Suite (AIS) enables companies to repurpose legacy business logic as web services and create a service-oriented data layer. AIS accelerates projects, leverages a standard set of technical skills and lowers risk when making existing assets part of an SOA.
Xchanging Ins-Sure Services – a joint venture between Lloyd’s of London, the IUA and Xchanging – used Attunity Connect (part of the Attunity Integration Suite) to merge two legacy claim processing applications into an agile claim processing services layer. These functions have been turned into standard, reusable services that give Xchanging Ins-Sure increased business agility and decreased exposure to losses. Brokers, managing agents and member agents benefit from expedited and expanded services; and the new architecture enables faster claims resolution for customers.
Leveraging SOA to deliver composite workplace applications
By design, workplace applications – which aim to harness and drive effectiveness into the non-routine activities carried out by management and knowledge workers – need to be extremely flexible, dynamic, and rapid to configure, deliver and re-configure, which lends itself to SOA.
Workplace applications are composite applications (or ‘mash-ups’) and make use of various information and services available within the enterprise. That is, they bring together information, activities and other services into an integrated working environment. As composite applications, workplace applications can leverage SOA to:
- Accelerate implementation time by leveraging existing services;
- Reduce risks and improve quality with proven building blocks;
- Simplify the integration with existing applications and accessing data sources;
- Seamlessly leverage standard web services, internal or external.
Leveraging XML, web services and SOA, Attunity InFocus brings together on a single platform all the necessary capabilities for robust management-focused workplace applications.
Highlights of InFocus and SOA include:
- A service-oriented model of workplace applications
- Support for web services for accessing information in the enterprise or on the Internet;
- An innovative approach for simple service composition for providing dynamic XML content, including tools and pre-packaged service libraries;
- Seamless integration (mash-up) of web applications and services;
- Internal architecture based on XML, HTTP, and web services.
In the US, development of workplace applications was rapid at Southeastern Freightlines. At this leading logistics company, Attunity quickly demonstrated the benefit to the sales management organization of having actionable information at their fingertips while in parallel showing the IT organization the prototyped solution in less than five days leveraging service composition and reusability.
The IT benefits of SOA combined with the capabilities of a workplace application platform such as Attunity InFocus provide enterprises with a roadmap for competitive differentiation and business agility.
To find out more contact marketing@attunity.com