Believing the SOA Hype

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the latest talk of the town, but is it necessary for IT departments to adopt? Let's take a look at a simplified display of SOA in action (from an end user's perspective) and tackle some of the issues associated with SOA.

With SOA, an IT end user is like a restaurant customer. In a restaurant, the customer places the order with the waiter and some minutes later the waiter delivers the order. What the customer doesn't see is the dozens of staff in the kitchen each doing their part to prepare, cook and present the food. Management must account for each of those back-end employees and their production to ensure the customer gets that meal on time. The process isn't linear; the order for each customer requires a different set of resources.

Do they want soup from the pot or salad from the refrigerator? How about a steak from the grill, or spaghetti from the stove? Does the customer want a baked potato from the oven or fries from the deep fryer?

The food for each person at a table may involve completely different services, but all must arrive in the waiter's hands in a timely manner.

SOA benefits
According to Forrester, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is hot for these reasons:

• Business agility is greater
• Implementation can be accomplished incrementally
• Existing infrastructure and applications can be leveraged without rebuilding from scratch

One important note to remember is that SOA is not a set of processes, procedures or best practices; it is an architectural strategy. And as an architectural strategy, organizations should ensure governance strategies and open discussions between IT and the business.

Common IT management reasons for implementing SOA are:

• Architecture supports and sustains shifting business requirements
• Components and services are technology neutral
• Time to market for new applications and functionality enhancements is shortened
• Reusable services reduce development times
• Reusable components reduce application inventories, eliminate duplication of efforts and lower ongoing support costs
• Internally and externally sourced components and services are transparent
• Consistent approach to application design simplifies interoperability across the enterprise
• IT infrastructure assets are more efficiently and effectively used

A Computerworld article about proving the worth of SOA cited that from 2006 to 2010, SOA could help Global 2,000 corporations save up to $53 billion in IT costs by cutting software purchases.

Ensure SOA success
An Ovum survey of more than 300 IT decision makers found that customers who have implemented IT service management best practices such as ITIL along with policy-based automated management tools are twice as likely as other firms to report that their SOA investments are meeting all their IT and business goals. The results show that the most satisfied SOA customers aim to improve business flexibility and IT's software reuse, but tend to overlook the increased levels of operational complexity that result from runtime deployment of SOA.

Gartner cites that through 2008, 70 percent of IT organizations will fail to successfully select and implement an SOA strategy on the first try. One reason Gartner notes is that organizations underestimate the complexity of SOA.

Regarding implementation, a survey of CIOs identified these top obstacles in SOA projects, according to Computerworld:

• Limited visibility for SOA value
• Limited in-house IT skills
• Limited vision/support or understanding from the business side
• Not enough in-house business analysts versed in SOA
• Change management around people or existing processes
• Balancing what comes first: services orientation or rearchitecting IT
• Lack of best practices or lessons learned
• Too much complexity

Data center impact
Today in non-SOA environments, data center staffs manage a large number of applications, many of which provide redundant functions. This environment is difficult to manage from both an application management and a service support perspective. In such an environment, if applications are not closely synchronized, it is possible to get different answers depending upon the application by which the data is accessed.

SOA reduces the number of applications or "components" that need to be managed. All applications share components providing the same functions, thus reducing the amount of components to manage and increasing the accuracy of changes when they impact enterprise applications.

Since components are shared in a more simplistic operating environment, it is easier to source infrastructure and predict future resource requirements. As a result, implementing SOA reduces environment complexity, permitting data center staff to more easily optimize the infrastructure and reduce associated infrastructure and support costs.