Making silos history

03.08.2005
Von Kenneth Liew

Just ask any roomful of CIOs about silo legacy systems, and you can almost be certain that majority of them will admit that these systems exist in their organization. But that could change, if the service-oriented architecture (SOA) succeeds in consigning silos to history.

?More and more customers are finally ?getting? SOA and are starting to initiate SOA projects. We have run a number of SOA summits and the feedback is tremendous,? says David Hodge, software IT architect, IBM Corp. Software Group, Asean.

?SOA is a standards-based organizational and design methodology that more closely aligns IT with business processes using a collection of shared services on a network,? says Steve Faris, vice president of Marketing, BEA Asia Pacific.

It is an evolution of distributed computing based on the request/reply design paradigm for synchronous and asynchronous applications, explains Raghu Kodali, writing for Javaworld. An application?s business logic or individual functions are modularized and presented as services for consumer/client applications. What is key to these services is their loosely coupled nature; that is, the service interface is independent of the implementation. Application developers or systems integrators can build applications by composing one or more services without knowing the services? underlying implementations, says Kodali.

Kodali also clarifies the confusion between SOA and web services. He cites a Gartner Inc. report in which Yefim Natis makes the distinction as follows: ?Web services are about technology specifications, whereas SOA is a software design principle. Notably, web services? WSDL is an SOA-suitable interface definition standard: this is where web services and SOA fundamentally connect.? Fundamentally, SOA is an architectural pattern, while web services are services implemented using a set of standards; Web services is one of the ways you can implement SOA. The benefit of implementing SOA with web services is that you achieve a platform-neutral approach to accessing services and better interoperability as more and more vendors support more and more web services specifications.

According to Forrester Research Inc., some form of SOA will be adopted by 89 percent of large, 61 percent of mid-sized and 40 percent of small and medium companies by the end of 2005. All companies need the business flexibility to execute new business strategies. But they often find themselves hindered by their IT history.

Companies have invested in heterogeneous IT systems that have frequently become ?silos? of information, challenges, says Simon Dale, vice president, business development, SAP NetWeaver/BPP, SAP AG Asia Pacific. This makes it difficult or impossible for a company to rapidly support the execution of new business processes with IT.

At the same time, most companies face a financial imperative to derive more value out of their existing IT investment, rather than investing in new technology and applications to overcome these challenges, he adds.

Joseph Gentry, vice president, Enterprise Transactions Systems, at Software AG, also argues that ?preserve and extend? is a faster, more cost-effective, less risky approach that CIOs ought to consider when thinking about the role of legacy systems in the continued growth of their businesses.

One reason is that legacy systems are still the lifeblood of most organizations (it has been estimated that 70 percent of the world?s data resides on mainframes), often representing years of intellectual capital, millions of dollars in investment and in some cases, competitive advantage, Gentry points out.

Another key reason is that, for the most part, the applications running on legacy systems still meet the heavy-lifting needs of the business in a fast, reliable and secure (if not ?sexy?) manner that even the largest farms of small servers cannot match.

According to Gentry, the move towards the SOA represents a flexible and sophisticated approach for preserving and extending legacy applications. Other options include maintaining the system as is (pure preservation); making minor enhancements such as adding a few fields to a database or creating some new reports; or to begin extending and modernizing the legacy application by, say, replacing the ?green screen? terminal with a new, graphical user interface or a web browser.

The move to an SOA involves the extension of legacy and other applications as web services. According to Gentry, adopting SOA will have profound implications not only on the ease with which the IT organization can create new and modify existing applications, but also on how the company does business with partners and customers well into the future. ?By providing a library of services that can be called upon to deliver features and perform tasks, SOA enables companies that adopt it to roll out products faster and adapt applications to meet evolving customer and business demands. And because it is based on open standards and widely supported across most vendor environments, as well as across a company?s own infrastructure, SOA will not lock a company into an architecture that could prove difficult to support in the future,? he says.

Oracle, too, sees SOA as the cornerstone design principle upon which organizations are building and integrating modern business applications. ?With this perception shift, we?re seeing demand for a new class of middleware software infrastructure that is engineered from the ground up with a service-oriented perspective,? says Sundar Ram, senior director, Apac Database Solutions, Oracle Corp. Asia Pacific.

The key advantage of SOA is the gain in business flexibility. ?A change in the business can be quickly catered for by the underlying infrastructure, at the least cost, when an effective SOA is in place,? says Hodge.

According to Ernest Chen, senior manager, Product Marketing, BEA Systems Inc. Asia Pacific, the benefits of the SOA are:

- Efficiency ? It can help transform business processes from silo, replicated processes into highly leveraged, shared services that cost less to maintain.

- Responsiveness ? It is able to adapt rapidly and deliver key business services to meet market demands for increased service levels to customer, employees, and partners.

- Adaptability ? It enables more effective roll-out of changes throughout the business with minimal complexity and effort, saving time and money.

- Reduced complexity ? Its standards-based compatibility versus point-to-point integration reduces complexity.

- Increased reuse ? It enables more efficient application/project development and delivery through the reuse of shared services previously developed and deployed.

- Legacy integration ? Legacy applications will be leveraged as reusable services, which lowers the cost of maintenance and integration.

Meanwhile, web services standards in the security, reliability, transaction and business process space will continue to mature. The recent emergence of grid computing, which Ram of Oracle describes as ?a natural step in SOA?, allows software to effectively pool together large numbers of low cost servers to create a virtual computing resource across the enterprise. In this manner, enterprise applications can be transparently distributed to use capacity very efficiently, at low cost, and with very high availability, he says.

SOA in this type of environment reduces and eliminates excess computing capacity through policy-based resource management; metrics-based workload management; and various means to maintain high-availability in grid environment.

With all the talk about the benefits of the SOA, CIOs must be thinking about how exactly they can implement such a move.

According to Dale, SOA initiatives can trigger a fundamental shift in the way organizations develop, deploy and manage their software landscape. The key to making the transition are education, coordination and support across the enterprise. This is not only essential but critical as companies seek to optimize their business processes and IT assets. ?Understanding and addressing the many layers of interdependencies and relationships will allow organizations to map out where to best leverage the ultimate value of creating a comprehensive SOA,? he added.

The length of time required to move to a SOA will depend on the existing IT landscape in terms of applications and technology and on the number of touched process. Companies with a large number of processes and a high level of individual configuration will want to take a gradual, step-by-step approach to migration, prioritizing mission-critical processes.

Companies will need to develop a roadmap for migration to a SOA. This roadmap has to be a step-by-step approach; with each step yielding a dedicated return of investment, so that the road to SOA becomes a self-funded process.

But it is also a road fraught with challenges. As with the adoption of any other IT paradigm, care must be taken when an organization decides to head down the SOA path.

Gentry of Software AG cautions that not all legacy systems are good candidates for the same level and sophistication of extension, or even preservation. ?Twenty years ago, a company typically had only one automated system, whereas today it is common to have as many as 100. Each system should be evaluated with respect to its value to the business and its place in the application life cycle management process,? he says.

Chen of BEA emphasizes that SOA is not just about products. ?It is about an approach to execute IT within an organization, and must be highly integrated with a company?s business objectives to reach its full potential. It will involve changes in organization governance, changes of skills and a different measurement of costs and benefits,? advises Chen.

Hodge of IBM agrees. ?Probably the biggest challenge in moving to SOA is organizational, rather than technical,? he says. ?An SOA will cut across existing organizational boundaries so an effective means of coordination and dispute resolution needs to be in place to facilitate deployment. And most organizations don?t have strong IT governance today so that can be the biggest challenge.?

?If we try to implement an SOA without the right governance structures and without the right underlying tools and techniques, you could be headed for a potential nightmare,? he warns.