Dr. J Interview on SOA
http://www.ciol.com/content/special/soa/
SOA’s agility, flexibility mitigates time to and cost of results.
The principle business benefit of the SOA setup lies in its ability to realize the agile and flexible enterprise systems that are capable of minimizing the impact of business driver changes: Dr. Jerry Smith, CTO, Symphony Services.
Sigi Achappa & Pradeep Chakraborty
Dr. Jerry Smith, CTO, Symphony Services, highlights that the principle business benefit of the SOA setup lies in its ability to realize the agile and flexible enterprise systems that are capable of minimizing the impact of business driver changes.
CIOL: How do you see the adoption rate for SOA adoption?
Dr. Jerry Smith: Companies by far are adopting SOA. According to a 2006 Yankee Group survey of 300 companies, planned use of SOA will reach over 80 percent in the wireless, retail, financial, manufacturing, and government verticals.
However, there are disparities in the adoption rate, but not necessarily by country. A key adoption factor is the size the company; that is, the smaller you are, the harder it is to adopt new technologies. Larger enterprise companies have more resources to expend on the adoption on emergent technologies, like SOA, in addition to the systematic organization changes required in departments like IT. Since India is playing a dominate role in product development for western companies, SOA adoption is disproportionately higher than other countries doing similar organic development activities.
CIOL: So, are you currently able to witness actual implementations?
JS: Yes, SOA has transitioned from the innovation and early adopter stages to the early majority stage, where practitioners are now basing business performance on its practical technology benefits. With commercial grade SOA-based development products like Oracle SOA Suite, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, and BEA Weblogic, companies are spending less time experimenting their way to building products (like during the early days of CORBA) and more time engineering their way based on product software building blocks.
CIOL: What would you attribute as the key business advantages from an SOA setup?
JS: SOA’s principle business benefit lies in its ability to realize agile and flexible enterprise systems capable of minimizing the impact of business driver changes. Business drivers are changing at an ever increasing rate, some say these changes occur at the speed of Moore’s law. Global innovation, new business models such as SaaS, and information-driven optimization are three examples having the most general impact on business drivers.
SOA’s agility and flexibility mitigate both the time to results and the cost of results. Changes to business drivers translate to specific enterprise performance requirements, which in turn require incremental investments in the technology. The levels of resources to meet these transitive demands are often larger in traditional architecture and substantially smaller when service-orientation can be applied to the business problem.
CIOL: How SOA can enable businesses gain a strategic competitive edge?
JS: SOA can enable businesses gain strategic competitive edge. Since SOA-based solutions exposes discoverable business processes to a larger commercial audience, companies that provide and promote reliable cost effective services will become the outsourced strategic provider to their end users. As such, they become part of a distributed service-oriented value chain.
CIOL: What would be the challenges involved with SOA implementation?
JS: Beyond the complexity of SOA development, not every project needs to be a SOA project. While SOA is suitable for many types of challenges being faced by business today, not all need to be SOA enabled. An SOA based solution should be considered for systems where services can be parallelized, where the average service size is larger in comparison to the size of the service, service boundaries are well defined and can be exposed, and few interdependencies between the services are carried out in the system. Sometimes, it is easier to understand what shouldn’t be implemented in SOA than what should be.
For example, a major developer of transportation management systems was considering their next generation systems; as such, SOA was a major point of discussion. Engineers wanted to implement every travel point in the systems as service, optimizing the route could then be achieved through self orchestration. While technically valid, the system suffered from severe performance problems because more time was taken up with orchestration than with the services themselves.
CIOL: Lastly, what would you say are the best practices in SOA adoption?
JS: There are several best practices in SOA adoption. However, one area that stands out the most is to have a strong, well articulated, and effective governance process. Organization need to ensure that the business valued promised through SOA is achieved through SOA. SOA value needs to be defined, measured, reported, and action upon.
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