B2Bi Technologies: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
What is Service Oriented Architecture?
IT departments are managing increasingly complex IT portfolios. Yet as business needs change, these departments must still ensure that their technologies remain aligned with business goals. Failure to do so compromises organizational agility.
The problem for IT departments is typically not insufficient functionality; rather, it is that critical business systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) operate in isolation from other critical business systems—despite the fact that business processes often span multiple applications. To obtain an end-to-end view of a complex business process necessitates integration of information and process silos. In the past, this has been accomplished either though time-consuming manual interventions, or through hard-coded solutions that are difficult to maintain.
Service orientation is an approach to organizing distributed IT resources into an integrated solution that breaks down information silos and maximizes business agility. Service orientation modularizes IT resources, creating loosely coupled business processes that integrate information across business systems. Critical to a well-designed service-oriented architecture is producing business process solutions that are relatively free from the constraints of the underlying IT infrastructure, because this enables the greater agility that businesses are seeking.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) ultimately enables the delivery of a new generation of dynamic applications (sometimes called composite applications). These applications provide end users with more accurate and comprehensive information and insight into processes, as well as the flexibility to access it in the most suitable form and presentation factor, whether through the Web or through a rich client or mobile device. Dynamic applications are what enable businesses to improve and automate manual tasks, to realize a consistent view of customers and partner relations, and to orchestrate business processes that comply with internal mandates and external regulations. The net result is that these businesses are able to gain the agility necessary for superior marketplace performance.
SOA defined
Service orientation is a means for integrating across diverse systems. Each IT resource, whether an application, system, or trading partner, can be accessed as a service. These capabilities are available through interfaces; complexity arises when service providers differ in their operating system or communication protocols, resulting in inoperability.
Service orientation uses standard protocols and conventional interfaces—usually Web services—to facilitate access to business logic and information among diverse services. Specifically, SOA allows the underlying service capabilities and interfaces to be composed into processes. Each process is itself a service, one that now offers up a new, aggregated capability. Because each new process is exposed through a standardized interface, the underlying implementation of the individual service providers is free to change without impacting how the service is consumed.
Why SOA?
Complex, distributed IT resources are a concern for businesses. Too frequently, the existing IT portfolio does not adequately meet specific business needs, is costly to manage and maintain, and is inflexible in the face of business growth and change. The solution, however, is not to rip and replace systems or applications, nor to completely renovate them, but rather to find a way to leverage existing IT investments so that overall organizational goals are effectively supported.
Service orientation helps to accomplish these goals by making systems more responsive to business needs, simpler to develop, and easier to maintain and manage. Implementing a solution architecture based upon service orientation helps organizations plan ahead for change, rather than responding reactively.