Lead Story

Integrating information with SOA

Service Oriented Architecture is being promoted in the industry as the next evolutionary step in software architecture to help IT organisations interlink different systems to meet their business goals. Faiz Askari reports

With the enormous growth of IT applications in business environments, integrating them has become a critical consideration for the average Indian CIO and is a subject that rarely strays from the top of his mind. Most business applications run on complex software solutions, and the level of complexity continues to increase. Traditional architectures seem to be reaching the limit of their capability in terms of dealing with this particular problem.

Several computing architectures have been deployed over the years. These have been designed to support distributed processing. While J2EE runs across platforms, most other architectures are tied to a particular platform. This is the reason why Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being promoted as the next evolutionary step in software architecture to help organisations face up to their increasingly complex challenges.

Giving a user’s perspective on the state of SOA at India Inc, Anand Sengupta, Head of IT at Daikin Air Conditioning says, “SOA is the latest buzz-word in the Indian IT community. Conceptually, this is the next big thing after OOPS (Object Oriented Programming). In organisations where there is a mix of heterogeneous systems, SOA makes a lot of sense as it eases application delivery. SOA enables you to design software systems that provide services to other applications through published and discoverable interfaces which specify where services can be invoked over a network.”

"SOA is catching on in India. However, selling the concept internally to non-IT people remains a hurdle" - Hilal Khan Head, IT Honda Siel Cars India

Adds Hilal Khan, Head of IT at Honda Siel Cars India, “SOA is a great concept and it is catching up in the country. At the same time, selling the concept internally to non-IT people is a hurdle, particularly in communicating its value to top management.”

According to Sunil Kapoor, Director, Central Buying, Fortis Healthcare, “SOA is definitely a great option for the Indian CIO. It provides an easy mechanism for integrating various applications, and a user can pick up relevant information in less time.”

Sunil Mehra, Director, Sales, Fusion Middleware, Oracle India says that “leading companies are tackling the complexity of their application and IT environments with SOA, which facilitates the development of modular business services that can be easily integrated and re-used, creating a truly flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure.”

The market for SOA software and services is still in its infancy, which explains why analyst projections are wide-ranging. In April 2005, Forrester projected that more than 70 percent of large enterprises would be using SOA today. IDC predicts that the market for SOA, including software, services and hardware, will reach $21 billion by 2007.

Forecasts R Dhamodaran, VP, Software Group and ISV & developer relations, IBM India, “As more companies in India hop on to the SOA bandwagon—particularly as SOA is an approach involving all aspects of a company’s IT infrastructure—it will become a substantial market in future.”

CIOs: all for SOA

Khan of Honda voices a common demand of the CIO community. “In my view, most organisations today need to provide a decision-support system with reasonable MIS to users. We also critically require executive dashboards that can indicate points to act or react upon.”

Meanwhile, Sengupta of Daikin has this to say, “Common questions are how will it help me in my present operations, and how is it different from what we are doing. Typically, if an organisation is running an ERP system, for example, SAP and all other systems such as CRM, SCM and BIW are add-ons to the core ERP module. In this scenario what role will SOA play? The concept of SOA is appealing, but how it is to be applied in a real-life situation remains to be seen. Probably only vendors will play a vital role in making the applications and role of SOA clearer.”

"With the concept of managed services gaining momentum, it's only a matter of time before service providers start implementing SOA" - Sanjay Kharade Principal Consultant Cisco Systems India & Saarc

Explaining a need which many organisations face with their IT infrastructure is Kapoor of Fortis. “Regardless of the technology that has been deployed by the IT department, the basic purpose of any implementation is to make work easier. Apart from this, any IT manager or CIO would love to have an infrastructure that is easy to manage.”

“The thinking goes like this,” informs Mukesh Kumar, CIO of Gillette. “Do I have to reconstruct my application architecture? This is a huge task, and sounds like a non-starter. What are the advantages that SOA can confer to an IT infrastructure? The biggest advantage will be re-usability of existing objects (now called services). This is expected to cut down delivery time and costs over a period of time. The architecture is better suited to today’s changing business requirements which are dynamic in nature.”

As a vendor dealing with CIOs across verticals, Sanjay Kharade, Principal Consultant, Cisco Systems India & Saarc believes that “responsiveness, cost-effectiveness, reliability, security and scalability of business solutions are major priorities for CIOs. As a network is the platform on which all business applications are delivered throughout the organisation, an SOA gives a CIO the tools to make this delivery highly efficient, ubiquitous and cost-effective.”

Demands made by most CIOs include:

• The ability to leverage existing assets.
• Support for all required types of integration.
• Support for incremental implementations and asset migration.
• It has to be built around a standard component framework.
• It must permit the implementation of fresh computing models as they emerge (for example, portal-based client models).
• It must be a cost-effective proposition.
• The solution must be quick to deploy and responsive in nature.

Enablers of SOA

Highlighting one factor that is driving the SOA market in India is Sengupta of Daikin. “The outsourcing model may be one of the key drivers for SOA as we go forward. The internal or ERP system of an organisation may have to talk to a system that resides at a third-party, e.g. a company whose travel-related services are outsourced to a third-party.”

However, Honda’s Khan believes that being customer-centric in nature, SOA is surging ahead in the market with considerable momentum. “Since the concept is been marketed with a customer-centric approach, SOA solutions are available in different sizes and forms as per the requirements of various industry verticals. This factor differentiates SOA from other concepts, and CIOs or IT heads of organisations find it easier to select it because SOA offers custom-made choices.”

“One area where SOA has been gaining ground is in its power as a mechanism for defining business services and operating models, and providing a structure for IT to deliver against actual business requirements and adapt in a similar way to the business,” states Kumar of Gillette.

Priorities of a CIO

An SOA architecture has both business and technology dimensions. From a business perspective, SOA involves architecting IT systems while keeping business services in mind. Instead of thinking in terms of technology, business users can think of IT systems in terms of business services and business process such as supply chain visibility, and customer and employee provisioning. Each business service is broken into a collection of well-organised services that can then be used to map business processes onto IT systems and applications. From an IT perspective, an SOA architecture spans multiple applications and platforms, and supports inter-operability using broadly accepted standards.

SOA is top-of-the-mind for enterprises. It addresses what is perhaps a CIO’s biggest concern. Previously they focussed on cost savings. Now they often focus on simplifying IT management.

Opines Sanjay Kharade of Cisco: “In India, CIOs of large enterprises are aware of SOA and are evaluating it. Some are even in the process of implementing it. Further, with the concept of managed services gaining momentum in the SMB segment, it’s only a matter of time before service providers start implementing SOA to effectively deliver applications and services.”

Adds Dhamodaran of IBM, “CIOs are interested in knowing more about SOA and how they can achieve benefits through it. It will be difficult to put it in terms of a priority chart, but it is definitely something which is top-of-mind for them.”

But why are organisations thinking of having an SOA in place? The reasons are many. IT environments have been built over time with diverse layers piled atop each other in an unwieldy mess. These legacy systems must be re-used rather than replaced, because with constrained budgets replacement is cost-prohibitive. People may find that cheap, ubiquitous access to the Internet has created the possibility of entirely new business models which must be evaluated (at the very least) simply because the competition is already doing so.

Comments Sunil Mehra of Oracle, “Growth by merger & acquisition has become standard fare, so entire IT organisations, applications and infrastructures must be integrated and absorbed. In an environment of this complexity, point solutions merely worsen the problem, so they cannot lead us out of the woods. Systems must be developed where heterogeneity is fundamental to the environment because they must accommodate an endless variety of hardware, operating systems, middleware, languages and data stores. The cumulative effect of decades of growth and evolution has produced severe complexity. With all these business challenges for IT, it is no wonder that application integration tops the priority list of many CIOs.” (An estimated 35 percent of CIOs place the utmost importance on integrating applications.)

CIOs have to hire / build talent as they need people who can guide them through the SOA journey. According to Akila Krishnakumar, CEO of Offshore Services at Sungard, “Picking the architecture is a significant decision in itself. CIOs will have to look for the ‘pigs with lipstick’ and eliminate them, however impressive their marketing front may be. Developing prototypes and studying reference implementations is the only way out.”

Establishing a strong SOA governance organisation should be at the top of a CIO’s mind. People will break the rules of SOA all the time for many reasons; it could be sheer ignorance, familiarity with other approaches, or just personal opinions and preferences. It is therefore important to get everyone on board with regard to the benefits that SOA confers.

"Conceptually, SOA is the next big thing after Object Oriented Programming" - Anand Sengupta Head, IT Daikin Air Conditioning

Sengupta cites some critical issues. “The key challenge would be standardising on interfaces. If and when a system involved in the SOA architecture is upgraded, then the interface should be able to handle the change without too much effort being expended. For example, if you have implemented SOA, and SAP is one of the applications that’s part of the SOA deployment, then the SOA should be robust enough to handle the change if the company goes in for a version upgrade. The limitations would be that in a homogenous software landscape SOA’s importance is limited as it would probably be part of the existing software running in an organisation.”

Adds IBM’s Dhamodaran: “The problems persist, and become more complex with every passing year. Basic business needs such as lowering costs, reducing cycle times, integration across the enterprise, B2B and B2C integration, greater ROI, and creating an adaptive and responsive business model keep us looking for better solutions…meanwhile, we increasingly find that point solutions can’t solve basic problems.”

There’s another typical issue faced by a CIO before he goes in for an SOA implantation. Listen to Krishnakumar: “Navigating through the hype and the alphabet soup which accompanies SOA can be a difficult task. CIOs have to ensure that business requirements come ahead of the technology, its limitations and its possibilities. First of all, a CIO has to make a business case for SOA, and he will encounter many questions along the way. The most prevalent one is ‘Does everybody in the organisation get the same view of customers, the business we do with them, and the relationships we manage with them?’ The answer to this is mostly ‘no.’ If the question changes to ‘Do we need to have a view like that?’ the answer is mostly ‘yes.’ CIOs have to learn to ask these questions from business leaders and get their firm backing for SOA.”

Quantifying ROI for an SOA architecture investment is a major challenge. An SOA architecture has a broad impact, with returns in multiple areas, but as with any other investment in IT architecture, these benefits are hard to quantify and detailed work is needed to evaluate them properly. Opines Vikram Duvvoori, Head, Middleware Practice, HCL Technologies, “An SOA architecture can be implemented incrementally, or as a full framework implementation. The right approach depends on the current architecture and IT investment cycle. Deciding on the core set of services, and defining to what detail these services will be supported by the IT applications, are the next challenges for SOA.”

Advantage SOA

Khan of Honda explains the advantages of having SOA in place. “To knit the various applications, services and structured and unstructured data to produce a meaningful MIS and action points. To enable standardisation of data points and re-use existing scattered applications for producing meaningful data.”

Emphasising the reduction in development time and cost, Sengupta says, “SOA services are easily re-used and can be rapidly assembled into new, composite applications. They also bring down maintenance costs. Re-usable services reduce the number and internal complexity of IT services.”

He also highlights other advantages such as enabling different applications to quickly and easily connect.

Kapoor of Fortis has the last word. “SOA can drastically reduce risk. Fewer, re-usable services provide greater control over corporate and IT governance policies, and reduce the overall compliance risk. In this way, SOA can offer peace of mind.”