One of SOA's foundations is web services: a collection of technologies such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML, which help systems and applications communicate regardless of different technologies and platforms. Leading SOA application platform vendors include IBM, Oracle, BEA Systems, SAP, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.
"SOA and software-as-a-service (SaaS) made major impacts on the IT strategies of enterprises across the spectrum in 2006," said Ravi Shekhar Pandey, senior analyst at Springboard Research. "As Asian businesses look to become more competitive in a booming business and economic environment, they want their IT to be more innovative, agile, and adaptive to changes in business needs."
BEA cleaves to SOA
"SOA was a major shift for us in 2006," said Yip Ly, VP of strategic business development at BEA. "We began to consider SOA within our entire product family about years ago [and] did all the work necessary to refocus our products so that they are completely aligned to SOA technologies-for internal use as well."
"In Asia, we have many SOA clients at the enterprise level, including telcos," said Ly. The BEA VP said these clients invested significantly in SOA during 2006 and would continue to do so in 2007. Ly said as A-Pac countries continue to invest in their infrastructure, enterprises seek to ride the wave of e-government activity. "Countries like China and India are building huge government infrastructures and enterprises will join those networks," he said.
"A key area of focus on web services is security-specifically, how to configure the accessibility of particular services," said Ly. "This is where company policy is vital. Some are pure technology-access policies, others have more of a business sense-based on business rules that will enable or disable the services to the consumer. Simply, who is the consumer of the services, at what time can they access the services?"
Agility, control, visibility
Using SOA to simplify enterprise architecture reduces costs, but also allows vendors to offer new services more easily-an advantage not lost on Oracle, with their large base of enterprise clients. Lionel Louie, director, Oracle Fusion Middleware, sales consulting, greater China, sees agility, control and visibility as major business drivers for SOA.
"One major change in 2006-standards bodies began pushing as the Internet continues to mature," said Louie. "Standards are driving the IT industry toward SOA-while people have talked about similar concepts before-with .Net or similar approaches-these could only be managed at a high cost." Now clients rely more on IT vendors to supply open standard infrastructures-this is one of the key technology drivers, according to Louie.
Industry-driven
Another perspective on SOA focuses on compliance. "In Hong Kong lately, a greater frequency of IPOs, mergers and acquisitions have made compliance a huge issue," said Louie. "These factors get people thinking that, in a merger for example, we'd better be able to streamline processes to more easily integrate or outsource. In terms of compliance, we need to be able to make our process visible or auditable where necessary-this is when Oracle can suggest SOA."
The financial services sector and telecoms service sector are growing fastest according to BEA's Ly, particularly in Asia. He sees the usage of SOA going beyond the traditional web browser in 2007. "There will be a lot of energy put into mobile devices and PDAs as well," he said. "This will drive the success of SOA even more as there will be more consumers addressed."
"What we have seen in 2006 in regard to spending were pilot projects, not core business processes," said Ly. "As users evolve their core processes using technologies like SOA, we see a spending trend. They are going to be spending more in 2007 at the business core-those purchases means decisions will be taken at a higher level, above the CIO level, and the schemes will have to go to board rooms to be approved."
For 2007, Oracle's Louie sees projects that involve core systems, like centralized banking, centralized telco customer-base systems or subscriber systems. "These demand a lot of well thought-out infrastructure design," he said. "We will see more detailed, longer planning cycles with more careful thought on how to structure the whole solution-this is a governance issue, as many in the industry is pushing standards and coming out with solutions in the web 2.0 arena."
"When I look at business trends in IT over 2006 I note there was no special focus on a particular technology area," said Paul Li, director of marketing, Sun Microsystems, greater China. "Rather, the trend is towards making things more transparent-the authorities are making sure that enterprises are doing the right thing [regarding] compliance. SOA makes companies want to have a sound IT infrastructure in order to comply with those rules. Also, the network growth at customer locations makes businesses consider deployment of web services and architectures that can handle diverse locations, time zones and to some extent, a customer's individual behavior."
Vendor accord
For Microsoft, the change to service-oriented communication marks a shift in how applications interact. Explicitly designed to support service-oriented applications for Microsoft, their WCF (Windows Communication Foundation-a programming model for using managed code to build unified web services and other distributed systems that can communicate) reflects this shift.
"How this communication is accomplished has taken a big step forward in the last few years," said Joelle Woo, director, Developer & Platform Group, Microsoft Hong Kong. "After decades of disagreement, all of the major vendors have agreed to support the same protocols for application communication."
"Based on SOAP, this global agreement on web services makes interoperability between applications built on different technology platforms, such as J2EE and the .NET Framework, significantly simpler than it has been in the past," she said. "It also makes the idea of SOA more plausible for most organizations."
Big Blue has also developed an SOA Foundation: an integrated set of open standards-based software, best practices, governance models and patterns to help clients model, assemble, deploy and manage SOA.
"IBM has taken an evolutionary approach to SOA, realizing that it has to be built on, and defined by a specific business strategy," said Ernest Lee, executive, Software Group, IBM China/Hong Kong. "Vendors can't sell an SOA to a customer-they can only sell software, hardware or services that support SOA functionality."
"Data from analyst firms-like Aberdeen Research and Forrester-demonstrate an increasing rise in SOA adoption," continued Lee, "predicting that the majority of companies will have developed SOA planning, design and programming experience this year, and that about half will be using SOA by year-end."
Lee said that as competitive forces increase, businesses will need to speed up SOA adoption to be able to better leverage information as a service by freeing it from closed and passive systems into active services that perform specific business functions. "SOA will come of age in 2007," declared Lee. "Analyst figures support this, predicting that global spending on SOA-based external services will experience triple-digit growth."
CIO agenda
"Our enterprise clients demand for proactive, predictive and real-time interaction with data, enabling them to free their operations from static information and pursue new uses of that information," said Lee. "They need to use existing information assets while proactively taking advantage of emerging information sources to gain a seamless flow of all forms of information-regardless of format, platform or location."
To help clients develop business models that facilitate better decision-making with real-time business information, IBM has identified five entry points: people, processes, information, connectivity and re-use-to provide customers with a systematic approach to starting SOA projects.
According to Microsoft's Woo, traditional concerns such as working with stored data and allowing access through a web browser are still important, but are no longer enough. "Modern applications also present a range of new challenges," said Woo. "Organizations are increasingly taking a process-oriented view of what they do. Since most applications automate some part of a business process, it can be useful to make the steps in this process explicit in the code. An effective way to do this is by using workflow technology, an approach that requires support for workflow-based applications."
In this approach, applications communicate with other applications both inside and outside the organization. Thus, these modern applications must fit into a SOA, exposing their functionality as interoperable services accessible by other software (a view supported by BEA's Ly). Achieving these goals requires support for service-oriented applications.
"Whether organizations embrace SOA or not, they will continue to look at ways to integrate their IT more effectively with their business goals and in the process also focus on dissolving IT complexities," said Springboard's Pandey. "We expect SOA to steadily spread its influence throughout Asian enterprises in 2007 and, in the process, fundamentally alter the way IT systems are operated and managed."
Model offers measure for SOA success
SOA has emerged as the most significant shift in how applications are designed, developed and implemented in the last 10 years.
A consortium of software vendors and consultants recently introduced the SOA Maturity Model, which is designed to provide IT decision makers with a framework for benchmarking the strategic value of their SOA implementations and planning. The model is divided into five levels.
Level 1: Initial services
At the initial stage, an organization creates definitions for services and integrates SOA into methodologies for project development. In a financial-services environment, a Level 1 project may use an application server or an enterprise service bus (ESB) adapter to create simple SOAP and HTTP web service invocations between a management system that places an order and a trading service that accepts the order.
Level 2: Architected services
At this stage, standards are set for the technical governance of an SOA implementation, typically under the leadership of the architecture organization. Standard SOA infrastructure and components, such as an ESB, a services and policies repository, an exception-management service, a transformation service and a single sign-on service, are used to foster greater re-use of services, as well as provide tight management and control of services across an organization.
Level 3: Business services and collaborative services
Level 3 features the introduction of business-oriented services, such as business process management (BPM). With a focus on the partnership between technology and business organizations, Level 3 optimizes the flexibility of business processes, allowing IT to respond quickly to changing business requirements.
For example, a Level 3 project utilizing BPM might use a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry to find a funds-transfer service that could significantly reduce settlement times. This service would be connected to the ESB process within hours of recognizing the business need.
Level 4: Measured business services
Level 4 provides continuous feedback on the performance and business impact of the processes implemented at Level 3. The key focus at this level is collecting data and providing that data to business users, enabling them to transform the way they respond to events.
In our example, a Level 4 project could introduce logging and a service to monitor business activity. These functions provide a collection and display process for business managers to view their trade routing operation and for compliance officers to monitor trading behaviors of their staff and customers.
Level 5: Optimized business services
At this final level, business-optimization rules are added, and the SOA becomes the nervous system for the enterprise. Automatic responses to the measurements and displays of Level 4 allow an organization to take immediate action on events.
A Level 5 project can take the request messages entering the ESB and route that information to an event-stream processor. This service correlates the behavior of all traders across multiple execution venues and identifies important patterns. This information might be used to execute new trades or stop a rogue trader who is out of view of compliance officers.
The SOA Maturity Model provides a framework for IT and business users to properly evaluate the applicability and benefits of SOA in an organization.
(IDG staff contributed to the article.)