An architect of success

Service-orientated architecture (SOA) is in use in many organisations, across many key verticals such as telecoms, financial services and government. But what are the key steps needed for its integration and where is SOA heading in the near future. For a better perspective, CXO speaks to Central Telecom’s Lynne Austin, Procession’s David Chassels, HP’s Manuel Rubio and Oracle’s Andrew Sutherland.

“We expect to see greater integration of SOA technologies and solutions with the rest of IT from a governance, integration quality and 'ongoing' management perspective ”
-Manuel Rubio, HP

The panel

Dr Andrew Sutherland, SVP of Oracle EMEA Technology, develops business strategies and manages competence in Middleware. Dr Sutherland has over 20 years of experience in emerging technologies and their application to business problems.

David Chassels is the CEO of Procession plc. He has written a number of papers about the importance of technology aligning people and their processes, which have been published in various journals.

Manuel Rubio is Business Development Manager of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the Technology Solutions Group at HP. He is responsible for the EMEA business development of SOA.

Lynne Austin, Business Development Manager for Central Telecom Ltd, is responsible for leading the companies strategic account relationships and expanding its managed services.

CXO. A key benefit of SOA is interoperability. How then can integrated, streamlined IT systems help companies grow and improve their bottom line and gain a competitive advantage?
Lynne Austin. SOA principles and capabilities have been around for many years. Many larger corporations have implemented large legacy applications be they CRM, billing systems, HR or accountancy systems. The implementation of these applications has been timely and have grown implementation and maintenance costs way higher then any IT department or supplier had ever documented, communicated or delivered. Over the years, such systems have gone through so many changes and are so tailored it is nearly impossible to integrate new products and applications to improve business deliveries.

Many companies realise the importance of ‘off the shelf’ applications and by using SOA, IT becomes an enabler to business delivery and not a millstone. Implementation of IT architectures and applications using SOA allow configuration and content changes to be easily implemented and, if possible, by business not IT professionals. We are still some way away from this mind set but significant change is occurring within IT departments. Middle and senior managers with business skills and awareness are being recruited, ensuring they understand the need for this level of agility.

Manuel Rubio. Businesses across the globe continue to struggle under increasing pressure to become more agile. Agility is the term to describe how rapidly a business can respond to first, take advantage of a new opportunity or change in market dynamic or second, respond to an external threat such as a new competitive offer, a consolidation activity, a pending compliance requirement or a macroeconomic factor that threatens the health and stability of the business. As more and more business is conducted digitally, the need for business agility maps to the need for IT agility, however IT organisations across the board are straining under the weight of ‘accidental architecture’. IT finds many of their resources locked up in monolithic, proprietary data and application silos that require armies of integration engineers to expose and connect. SOA promises a new, more agile approach to delivering new and evolved business functionality by composing business capability from loosely-coupled shared services exposed by interoperable, standards-based and well-described interfaces. As an IT organisation successfully evolves their architecture to be SOA-based, more and more of their needed capabilities become easily re-useable, shared services rather than proprietary, hard-wired application and integration projects. This translates into being able to respond to new business demands. 

David Chassels. The first point to make is that there are two ways to deploy SOA as a new IT architecture and the contained use call it ‘SOA in a box’. The former will be a long journey for large companies as the architecture enabling capabilities that can be shared across lines of business to deliver greater flexibility from business applications. The ‘SOA in a box’ is a simpler use of SOA principles with focus on supporting people in their daily work. People are the source of all information and in reality there are relatively few work task types, human and system that can address any business issue. By creating these as configurable services in a data centric environment you create a highly flexible ‘SOA in a box’ to ensure constant improvement and competitive advantage where it matters with people.

Andrew Sutherland. Today, organisations of all types face one common and persistent challenge: how to become ¬– and remain – agile while staying ahead of the competition. The solution is business integration. Combining business process management (BPM) and a service-oriented approach to IT management, business integration promotes efficiency and automation across all processes, ensuring that existing IT assets support actual business processes and new IT investment is focused on maximum return. Today’s SOA-based approach which puts business and IT on equal footing, eases this integration. By combining a SOA strategy with BPM, organisations can ensure a graceful, gradual, and successful transition towards complete business integration.

CXO. Do you believe most companies realise the benefits? What sort of ROI is there?
LA. No. Larger corporations will have no choice but to adopt this revised SOA approach. The debate on the ROI model will be one around detaching legacy and moving to this new model. A key question will always be how much of the multi-million euro CRM, Billing, HR application delivered five years ago can be written off, replaced or amended with an SOA architecture versus the cost of not doing this and your key competitors being first to market with new products and services. Few enterprises fully understand the business context in which their communications occur yet real time communications are the key to the normal operations of many processes becoming critical when exception or crisis events require rapid response and quick decision. Central Telecom, because of its unique market position, can integrate real communications such as Unified Comms to automate specific business processes within the production and productivity stream of a business to increase revenues, customer satisfaction, faster response rates, lower operational costs and higher returns on technology investments.

MR. This is an interesting question as it implies that companies who desire to implement SOA actually succeed in implementing the intent of SOA rather than just developing and exposing services. The trap that many companies fall into as they embark on their SOA journey is thinking that they will realise agility benefits simply by turning their application functionality into a bunch of web services or buying an Enterprise Service Bus or other SOA platform technology. This is a common scenario that we see play out again and again. This will not realise the ROI of agility as these companies will still require massive integration resources (this time trained in the ESB or WS technologies) to make changes, still result in duplicative functionality as services will not be discoverable, trusted and shareable, and still result in service domain silos that may or may not map to the most critical needs of the business.
 
DC. The key end game promoted for SOA adoption is flexibility to change applications as required by the business. A simple must have but yet to be widely demonstrable. Adopting the ‘SOA in a box’ delivers this quickly and elegantly where it matters with people For SOA there is concern at business level on a ROI as evidenced by recent industry analysts indicating a drop in adoption. As recession bites SOA may be a nice to have but ROI criteria have changed to basically quick wins and this may be a challenge for SOA. On the other hand, ‘SOA in a box’ has a different profile where ROI can be tangible very quickly and with resultant automation can see real savings with in the year.

AS. Yes. Companies using SOA are now better able to quantify the benefits they achieve. The two main benefits are a reduction in operating costs and increased agility to accommodate the demands from the business in appropriate timescales. Companies can increase their reuse of business services and at the same time reduce the amount of costly integration. The trick is to select and prioritise a number of projects from which the reusable assets can be built and harvested. Each project should deliver something back to the business in terms of a benefit for a future project. In this way we can start to build and measure an ROI by capturing the actual development days required in the build.

CXO. What is the biggest misconception about application integration and SOA in the marketplace?
LA. One of the biggest misconceptions is that web standards and Java alone will resolve system integration issues. Although these standards have come a long way in improving system integration and application flows it will not resolve information exchange between applications. What SOA does not do without taking a further step is to integrate communications and collaborative capabilities. However, because of the way that SOA works, if automated communications software is a feature of the SOA environment and available as a set of web services then business processes can be designed to take advantage of it.

MR. We believe that the biggest misconception around app integration and SOA is that they are essentially the same. SOA represents a better way to do application integration and once you have installed and enabled IT with a SOA-based app integration software product – think ESB – that you are done. SOA is much more than integration and while a SOA approach can greatly simplify the process of integrating applications, it is only simplified when all the other key aspects of adopting SOA are embraced. It's only by embracing a service approach, aligning business and IT behind the concept of building out shared business services, enabling the service lifecycle with governance and management and aligning the IT silos who contribute to the successful realisation of a service lifecycle, including the enterprise architecture teams, service providers, consumers, QA and testing teams and on-going operations that the type of agility and simplification of integration be achieved. Certainly, integration technologies that are designed for a SOA approach help as well but only in the overall context of embracing SOA across the IT organisations and SOA domains.

DC. We have no view because there are no misconceptions.

AS. The perceived risks associated with exposing a company’s IT systems to outside threats have traditionally deterred investment in SOA. However, the risks are not insurmountable. To provide IT security for SOA requires an end-to-end identity management capability that can determine access rights for every application involved, preferably a fully integrated stack of the requisite technology required to enable all of the necessary identity & access management (I&AM) capabilities.

CXO. New systems often require re-training of staff – what new skills are needed to manage a SOA?
LA. SOA requires a change of the way IT departments behave from managers, developers through to architects. Although there are many books, and training courses around WEB, Java, VXML environments, and develops are plentiful within the current market, staff require training on business processes, project-oriented development and business requirements and analysis. This approach will ensure a more focused business lead IT organisation which is aligned to the challengers and goals of the business.

MR. This is a broad question and an important one. SOA impacts all aspects of IT as it necessitates new processes across the service lifecycle. First of all, it introduces new roles – the role of service provider and service consumer as well as the need for an empowered architecture team or Center of Excellence who are the stewards of the successful transformation to the SOA approach and who drive the consistency and control required for successful deployment across domains and the enterprise. For a best reflection of the new skills required to manage a SOA, refer to the HP SOA domain model. 

DC. There does appear to be a skill shortage to install SOA and one of the causes for the fall in adoption as mentioned. SOA skills to deliver remain very much with IT. However the ‘SOA in a box’ is quite different where the core business code never changes and can deliver on any business issue led by the business analyst working direct with the business. Business analysts will become more productive and in a more satisfying role which should attract a wide range of business experience including business savvy technical people.

AS. Achieving benefit from SOA is contingent upon the ability to effectively manage the SOA environment across the enterprise. The purpose of SOA governance is to regulate and manage reusable assets, preventing proliferation and misuse. A successful SOA governance framework requires the right mix of people, process, and technology. The formula for that mix begins with a clear understanding of governance goals, and how they are to be achieved. Oracle’s SOA governance framework offers a structured approach to implementing this vital aspect.

CXO. How do you see SOA evolving over the next few years?
LA. Alignment around business to IT development techniques, with a ‘can do’ attitude and realistic time deliveries. Communications-Enabled Business Process (CEBP) can be seen as the next stage in the evolution of business applications, building on and integrating with the advances of SOA and Event Driven Architecture (EDA) to enable the design of the whole business process. The long-term opportunity for CEBP has the potential to become a driving force in the continuous improvement of the organisation. Ultimately, the end vision is a comprehensive multi-channel communication access architecture that increases business agility through rapid, intelligent responses to business events that finds and connects the right people, at the right time, with the right devices. This integration will enable businesses to keep their decision-making processes moving towards resolution, whether for application-to-application tasks, human-to-application, or application-to-human communications related tasks.

MR. Customers who are successfully building out their SOA and creating business-driven capabilities using a SOA approach which are returning measureable ROI will see their SOA efforts grow from project to multi-domain and eventually enterprise. We expect to see greater integration of SOA technologies and solutions with the rest of IT from a governance, integration, quality and on-going management perspective. We also see SOA supporting and adding a level of enterprise quality of service and governance to web-oriented applications and mash-ups. In addition, as we look out over the next few years and the growing interest in and acceptance of software-as-a-service and cloud models, we see that SOA can be an enabler of such service providers and cloud providers. We expect to see SOA implemented in the cloud and by SaaS providers to make it easier to onboard new service consumers, manage change, quickly provision out new service capabilities and manage business contractual expectations.

DC. I think SOA as a concept for an improved architecture will slowly be adopted but will provide more tangible benefit to the large organisations trying to sort out a mess of legacy systems. On the other hand the relatively new ‘SOA in a box’ is a simpler yet powerful approach that already has the all application requirements embedded into its contained environment. I see the SOA principles will have an important role in supporting Value Networks recognising the need to focus where value is created and this requires people supporting applications that are flexible.

AS. At Oracle we believe that EDA (Event-Driven Architecture) is the next step in SOA’s evolution. The challenge is that the more applications and services a business has, the higher the complexity of integrating services in a unified, cohesive manner – particularly around a specific event or service. Therefore, it is crucial that companies realise the importance of an EDA and its ability to capture, process, analyse and manage events in real-time. Once they do, they will have the ability to dynamically configure their systems, processes and applications towards a more efficient and agile business model.

SOA provides a software architecture that delivers business agility by automating the process of pooling together all systems, applications and services. Event-Driven Architecture takes this a step further. It provides a style of application architecture centred on an asynchronous ‘push’-based communication model. It is currently the primary option for implementing ‘straight through’ multi-stage business processes that deliver goods, services and information with minimum delay. Without an SOA, an EDA would not be possible.

Building applications and systems around an event-driven architecture allows these applications and systems to be constructed in a manner that facilitates more responsiveness, since event-driven systems are, by design, better suited to unpredictable and asynchronous environments.