The sonic boom

CXO speaks with Dave Chappell, Vice President & Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software Corp.

CXO. How would you define application integration? What is the biggest misconception about application integration and SOA in the marketplace? Is the market realistic about what they can offer?

DC. Application integration is the discipline of getting discrete applications or application components – largely called services today – to exchange information and facilitate automation of business processes. Poor integration can result in a struggle to find ‘one version of the truth’ among contradictory reports generated by siloed systems, or needlessly high transactional costs associated with manual steps taken to move data around. Worse, the complexities of integration can lead to brittle or inflexible systems that are simply too hard to change. It is the prospect of solving these problems that is generating all of the excitement about SOA today.

The biggest misconception today is that web services standards are the same thing as SOA, and that they alone solve the integration problem. There is a growing awareness in the market that web services standards are a necessary, but insufficient technology for a SOA solution. In particular, web services today have no provisions to reconcile incompatibilities of application data format and meaning. But more critically, alone they lack the flexibility and scalability required for an enterprise deployment without creating new maintenance nightmares. It is this awareness that drives the demand for an enterprise service bus (ESB), software infrastructure that combines web services with the other critical capabilities required to make SOA a practical reality.

Today, most of Sonic’s ESB customers have a vision of SOA that provides application integration as a matter of course. BAA Plc. (British Airport Authority) is building the IT infrastructure for the new Heathrow Terminal 5 using SOA as the foundation. Here Sonic ESB is the foundation that coordinates communication across the thousands of moving parts that make up an airport terminal.

CXO. The premise of a SOA is being able to have your applications work like services. How does software work as a service?

DC. Services are simply software programmes that perform discrete business tasks and can be combined across a network of computers as modular building blocks to automate business processes. More and more, applications are designed to make their functionality available to other applications as services, and this makes it much easier to combine them to do new business functions. For example, the business function “get invoice history” is one that you can easily imagine using in many different business processes. An SOA is the result of this practice of building and using software in networks of modular services. Done right, it will give you more business flexibility at a reduced cost. The flexibility comes from the fact that these business modules can be re-combined and extended to perform new functions, without breaking existing systems. The reduced costs come from the opportunity to re-use existing services. Experts contend that organisations should strive to reuse 30-40 percent of all available services. To do this successfully, services need to be defined carefully, to be published to the rest of the organidation through a registry, and to be made broadly available for flexible re-use through an ESB.

CXO. What is the relationship between SOA and web services; SOA and grid computing? Where do you see XML networking going?

DC. While SOA and web services have certainly become closely linked, they are decidedly not the same thing. Industry veterans will correctly note that people have been building SOAs before there were web services. Likewise, you can misuse web services and end up with an incoherent, accidental architecture that nobody would call an SOA.

The advent of web services has sparked broad interest in SOA by providing a set of standards, which have gained widespread adoption among major software vendors and end-users. In effect, web services, and supporting software infrastructure products –namely ESBs, registries and Web services management tools – have made SOA applicable to meet a much broader range of business challenges.

At Sonic, we see SOA and the ESB as an enabler of grid computing. As applications and services are connected ubiquitously, it will be a natural progression to think about IT assets from a grid perspective, with dynamic configuration and provisioning as an integral part of the enterprise nervous system. In this context, the ESB provides the fabric by which dynamic configuration and provision can happen across a distributed environment.

XML networking is already a critical element of SOA, and its importance will continue to grow. As SOA becomes more prevalent, XML representing real-time streams of business events will literally course through the corporate IT network, and present organisations a rich opportunity to make critical decisions based on trends and patterns discovered among them. Advanced event stream processing (ESP) tools along with an ESB infrastructure help organizations take action on data in real time. XML pipelining and caching make it possible to manage the large volumes of data that flow through the network.

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? Do you believe most corporations realise the benefits? What sort of ROI is there?

DC. There are many opportunities for business benefit from the interoperability that SOA provides. Certainly, the IT benefits of interoperability – we don’t need to pay extra to get software to work together properly – are real, but they are usually small compared to the benefits to the business users.

First, you find significant savings in administration and productivity alone. A major Canadian energy trust paid for its SOA investment through savings of these kinds by implementing just four of fifty rapid ESB projects they identified in their first phase of deployment.

Then, the savings associated with reducing cycle time can be even greater. For example, Axfood, a 1300-store grocery chain in Scandinavia, reduced replenishment cycles from three days to two using an ESB, and as a result can cut their inventory carry costs by over US$1 million a year.

Finally, innovative companies like Provide Commerce, which operates Proflowers.com, leverage SOA interoperability to create industry-leading business models. Using Sonic ESB, Proflowers cut the supply-chain cycle for flowers from 7-12 days to 3-4 days. They do this by shipping directly from the grower to your house, and this gives them the unique market value proposition of being the low-cost leader with a seven-day freshness guarantee. That’s only possible because they have the ability to manage their supply chain from end to end through their SOA.

Process acceleration is also key for financial services, where SOA is at the heart of many organisations’ straight-through processing initiatives. The list goes on and on. That’s why the industry is so excited about SOA.

CXO. New systems often require re-training of staff – what new skills are needed to manage a SOA?

DC. Unlike prior generations of proprietary messaging and EAI solutions, SOA development today is largely standards-based. A plethora of books and magazines on Java, XML and web services helps to supply a ready market of developers and architects with the relevant skills.

That said, SOA requires that managers, architects and developers learn new skills and – more importantly – think differently about business applications. It can be challenging to think about a business process apart from full applications. Your developers need to carefully define services that are meaningful to the business and that have real potential for re-use. Finally, SOA promotes an iterative, project-oriented style of development, with a much faster cycle of change than those associated with the development of monolithic applications. This too requires a new way of thinking about project management and the architectural leadership required to combine the right representatives from the business and IT organisations. But, the benefit will be a dynamic response to business change, and that’s what it’s all about, after all.