How do service-oriented architectures really benefit business?

As industry excitement over service-oriented architectures (SOAs) continues to rise, Terry Riches, Senior Business Manager for Support & Intelligent Infrastructures for Comunica Limited, looks at the benefits that SOAs can deliver and how these benefits can be realised in the enterprise.

Why a different approach to IT architectures is needed

Why are businesses adopting SOAs? Well the short answer is that they promise three things that businesses desire from their IT infrastructure, namely:

* Increased business agility

* faster time to market

* lower costs by re-using what you already have.

New IT strategies--both in the applications and infrastructure layers--are needed because the business environment is changing.

The growing effects of global competition and the increasing speed of change mean that all types of business need to become more agile--that is, able to react more quickly to change--while also complying with regulatory demands and improving their management and use of business information. At the same time to stay competitive they have to continually work to improve productivity and lower costs.

Neil Ward-Dutton and Neil Macehiter, writing in late 2005, comment "Improving IT-business alignment requires an evolution both in technology and technology thinking, which makes it easier for organisations to more effectively exploit their existing IT assets; and re-prioritise IT investment, delivery and strategy so that IT assets can be more readily directed to deal with business change." (1) Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have arisen as a response to these requirements. The aim is to make IT systems more responsive to ever-changing business requirements and to do so at a lower cost than traditional approaches. Cost reduction is key. IBM recently surveyed its customers that had implemented a SOA and found that around 92% of respondents had started a SOA initiative in order to reduce costs, with 51% saying that they had actually realised cost savings.

It must be emphasised that although there is a lot of hype surrounding SOAs, real-life implementations suggest that this approach delivers tangible benefits to the enterprise. While the initial interest in an SOA implementation may very well be to save money, experience shows that more important benefits are delivered including improved agility, better alignment of the business and IT, user adoption and support for business innovation.

So what is an SOA?

While there are multiple informal definitions of SOAs, there is thus far only one formal definition. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) defines SOA as: "A paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations."

Analysys Research's Teresa Cottam offers a simpler definition of an SOA as "an integration architecture that views applications and information as services that can used to create new, flexible business processes." (2) In other words, an SOA is a software architecture that defines the use of loosely-coupled software services to support the requirements of business processes and application users. An SOA sees applications as building blocks for services provided to end users. This allows reuse of applications across the enterprise; in contrast to the approach of continually implementing new applications in a stove-pipe fashion to support individual services. The most commonly-used components of an SOA are technologies such as web services, portal frameworks, application servers, integration frameworks and security frameworks. Traditionally, applications have often been delivered piecemeal, paid for out of departmental budgets. This results in higher total cost of ownership (TCO) for the company as a whole - pushing up IT costs while not delivering optimal results for the business. The desire to reduce costs by re-using what an enterprise already has, and also increase flexibility by reducing the time to implement a new service, has led enterprises to adopt SOAs, which is basically a new approach to deploying and integrating applications. SOAs allow re-use of assets in the applications layer and enable quicker and easier integration (thereby reducing the so-called "integration tax"). Overall they can increase flexibility and the speed of deployment while also reducing the cost of deployment through consolidation, reuse and lower integration costs. The benefits of using an SOA approach are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: How SOAs address business demands

   Business driver                 Legacy                   SOA

Reduce costs           High TCO due to cost of         Improves
                       integration, inefficient use    utilisation,
                       of resources, slow              lowers TCO,
                       deployment                      allows re-use

React to change        Implementing stove-pipe         Speeds
                       applications means longer       subsequent
                       time to deploy                  deployment,
                                                       allows
                                                       resources to be
                                                       reused as
                                                       business changes

Become compliant       Decentralised data storage      Single view of
                       makes audits more difficult,    data enables
                       difficult to monitor that IT    effective
                       policies are being enforced     auditing,
                                                       easier to ensure
                                                       that IT
                                                       policies are
                                                       being enforced

Better use and mgt of  Data silos create problems for  Makes data
business info          managing and using data.        easier to use
                       Business continutity is more    cross-enterprise
                       difficult, data inconsistency   for analytics
                       presents problems.              etc. Allows
                                                       increased
                                                       automation of
                                                       data mgt.

Increase productivity  More time consuming to          Increased
                       manage due to duplication       productivity
                                                       narrower range
                                                       of expertise
                                                       required,
                                                       reducing staff
                                                       costs
                                                       & potential
                                                       skill gap
                                                       problems

Using SOAs in the real world

AMR Research conducted a survey of 134 enterprises in 2005, which found that 44% of early SOA adopters were concentrating on internal business processes. The most common projects were application integration and IT help desk. (3) Comunica has already implemented a re-usable service-oriented architecture in response to the needs of its large enterprise customers. The driver to designing our SOA was a project initiated by a large corporate customer who wanted to exploit the power of their Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) investment. (4) There has long been a recognition that IIM applications should be integrated with a client's service desk application. The practical barriers though were the sheer number of applications, their tendency to be customised and keeping track with version releases. In addition to this, a service ticket that relates to an IT issue will more than likely be passed to a team who are not using the same service desk application interface, which means that the integration complexity is doubled. The opportunity in this case was to:

1. provide the service desk with access to additional information about the state of the user's IT environment

2. contextualise this in a no-nonsense way that would assist the fault process

3. as a minimum, reduce the call time by an average of one minute--thereby recovering two minutes of productivity.

The Comunica service-oriented architecture employs a three-tier architecture which comprises a data source layer, a middleware layer and a presentation layer, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Simplified Comunica SOA architecture

Presentation  Web Views for the service
              desk and technical support
              teams

Middleware    Links and aggregates data
              sources, applies business
              logic, marshals data access
              and security. Converts
              data to a common format

Data sources  Typically sources: Active
              Directory, IM db, asset mgt,
              Voice system, HR DB,
              desktop device db Wireless
              LAN system

The level of automation achieved means that when an end user calls the helpdesk, the call handler can quickly identify who is calling and, using the information gathered from the intelligent infrastructure management system, see all the devices associated with this person, where they are and what their current functional state is. This speeds up resolution since the end user does not have to explain who they are or what the problem is. The client was able to exceed its goal of cutting one minute per call to the service desk, which when multiplied across the whole site equated to a saving of over 3,000 minutes per month.

www.comunica.co.uk

www.comunica.co.uk

(1) See 'Application delivery and SOA: a lifecycle approach', Neil Ward-Dutton and Neil Macehiter, November 2005 (http://www.mwdadvisors.com)

See Analysys Research, World Telecoms BSS and OSS Markets: trends and analysis, Cambridge 2006.

(3) See AMR Research: 'Service-Oriented Architectures: Survey Findings on Deployments and Plans for the Future', Eric Austvold and Karen Carter, 2005 (www.amrresearch.com)

(4) Intelligent Infrastructure Management is a real time physical layer monitoring technology that provides accurate information about network asset connectivity and physical location.