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SOA Platforms: Software Infrastructure Requirements for Successful SOA Deployments
Butler Group, June 2007, Pages: 324
Four decades of accumulating IT resources should have delivered a set of application capabilities that would allow a business to adapt efficiently to any new twist that the market brings. Unfortunately this has not been borne out by reality. Because of the relentless advances in technology, applications have become divorced from one another, divided by the gulfs that separate the underlying technologies from one another.
The sum invested in this IT legacy is too considerable to countenance the ‘rip and replace’ strategy that has been promoted at the beginning of previous disruptive IT innovations. SOA is the first major IT innovation that has not made the assumption that earlier investment must be replaced in order to benefit from the new technology. In fact the opposite applies – the initial focus of SOA is to add value to existing investments by breaking down the barriers created by the different generations of technology.
Business Issues
For several years since the beginning of the millennium business strategies have focused on cost cutting to achieve competitive advantage. The law of diminishing returns has now cut in – for most organisations further significant cost-cutting would result in damage to the ability of the organisation to conduct its business. The market has returned to slow growth, but for many industries the focus has changed in the intervening years, and business models need to adapt to take advantage of the new market opportunities.
The expectations of customers, suppliers, and business partners have been influenced by the Web such that an organisation needs to show a more joined-up approach to its interactions with external entities. Internally, organisations can still benefit from further efficiencies by examining not just individual activities, but also the flow of work between all the individual activities that make up a business process.
These issues add up to the expectation that IT will become more responsive to business requirements. The barriers that exist between business managers and the IT organisation need to be removed, and where possible business managers should be able to define a policy and have that policy implemented directly, with minimal need to have the policy translated into code by IT specialists. The future is likely to lead to the direct implementation of business policy within IT systems, and SOA is one of the enablement steps in this journey.
Technology Issues
Some of the technology issues in implementing SOA are obvious, others less so but equally important.
The first obvious requirement for SOA is that existing applications should become addressable as services. This requires a layer of software – an application adapter – that understands the application interface specifics at one end, and can accept and deliver standards-based messages at the other end, performing the necessary mapping in between. This connectivity can be very complex, leading to a lively specialist market in adapter technology.
The system needs to detect events that must be actioned, and create appropriate messages. The events might be created by a simple user interface, the receipt of a message from an external source, or by some combination of states both within and outside of the organisation. Complex event detection will grow in importance over the next several years, being used increasingly as a business differentiator.
Messages need to be moved from the creator to the correct service, and this has a number of associated technology issues. The underlying message infrastructure must be reliable, scalable, and low latency. It must also be secure, particularly where the public Internet forms part of the message path. Messages need to be in the correct format to be understood by the receiving service. This will frequently require a message to be transformed by intelligent software, particularly in a Business-to-Business (B2B) scenario where the organisation does not have direct control over the format of incoming messages. Finally, messages need to be routed to the correct service. However, the ‘correct’ service might change over time, and might depend on the context. For instance, a high-priority request might be routed to a different copy of a service where it will get more immediate attention. Intelligent software should be able to analyse the message and determine, through the application of rules, the correct service endpoint.
Beyond these basic requirements, there is a need to assemble services into composites to represent higher valued business operations, and to sequence them to represent the flow of a business process. Decision points will need to be built in so that the result of a previous step can be examined before determining which should be the next step in the sequence. This orchestration must be analysed and defined, and then the execution managed for many concurrent operations.
These activities represent a wealth of information that can be captured and used in analysis to further improve the effectiveness of business processes. The collection and analysis forms a part of Business Activity Monitoring, which is growing in importance as familiarity is gained in the use of SOA.
All of this needs to take place in a managed environment. Governance of SOA is complex because of the number of separate components involved, and because of the ability to apply changes very rapidly. Technology on its own cannot address this (though the support of appropriate technology is essential). SOA should be approached by the use of a methodology that addresses governance aspects, and provides for the creation of roles with responsibility and authorisation to manage the many different aspects of analysis, modelling, design, implementation, and change management.
Market Issues
SOA is widely recognised as a growth opportunity for software vendors, and because of the very broad functionality needed to enable a SOA deployment it has attracted vendors from several different specialisations to compete for market space. Although SOA capabilities can be built piecemeal from best-of-breed products, this is mostly not the way that organisations like to buy software. Generally, the buying preference is for a suite that delivers most or all of the functionality needed. Hence the early market had no single vendor that could provide the entire breadth of capabilities, resulting in the formation of many partnership models. Over the last few years, vendors have been investing in the ability to deliver the entire suite through a combination of internal development and acquisition. Now several vendors can deliver all of the major requirements, but most still need to partner to deliver some of the pieces of the puzzle.
The current market has a large number of vendors all attempting to provide complete suites. As the market matures it is inevitable that the number of competing vendors will be reduced through acquisitions, mergers, and vendors deciding unilaterally to target different markets. At the present time SOA vendors mainly target large enterprises, so the market is dominated by high value, low volume sales. This will start to change within two or three years as the large enterprise market starts to become saturated. The need to address medium-sized enterprises will not just impact sales and marketing strategies, but will also have a large impact on the products themselves, with ease-of-use and reduced administration being prerequisites to mid-market success.
Conclusion
The SOA platform market is on the point of evolving from early adopter to the market adoption phase of deployment. As might be expected, this is starting to drive price pressure, and user expectations of completeness of scope and ease-of-use are increasing. Inevitably this will accelerate the acquisition rate, and even quite significant vendors such as web Methods have been shown to be vulnerable. The result is generally positive for existing customers of companies being acquired due to the greater stability and combined mass of the two organisations.
Commoditisation will further change the market, with open source and innovative licensing schemes putting pressure on the traditional front-loading of revenue based on initial licence fees and ongoing maintenance. This will start to pave the way for greater adoption of SOA as a hosted infrastructure service, offering medium-sized organisations the economies of scale previously only available to large enterprises.
SOA is set to become a long-term feature of the IT landscape (although there is significant doubt that the term itself will be very long-lived, since acronyms such as this provide an instant turn-off to the business managers that the architecture is supposed to attract).
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