30 Minute Interview

“SOA is a collection of concepts”

David Nichols, Executive Partner and Global Lead, Service Oriented Architecture, Accenture talks to Varun Aggarwal about SOA, the challenges in adopting it and the state of SOA at Accenture India.

David Nichols

The evolution of SOA

SOA in itself is not new. The concept has been here for a while. What makes it appealing to the people is that we have standards now, standards that have been proven again and again. The integration of these standards into the architecture are making SOA ready for prime time. The reason why it is important and why companies are interested in it is because what we done over the years, is that we’ve learned how to run our business on a collection of applications. We are moving from the application paradigm to a services paradigm. Now we can more tightly integrate our underlying technical infrastructure to the business process whereas before we had to conform to the way the applications were designed to function. So, that allows one to integrate strategic changes into their business a lot quicker, that allows one to bring products and services to the market a lot quicker, and also allows one to customise in a way that makes them unique and give an edge over their competitors.

SOA: a definition

SOA is a collection of concepts. It could be a service from Enterprise Java Beans or services from a low procedure call, Web services are just the most common service to implement. It may not even be Web services, even though a majority of SOA implementations do use them. SOA not only ncludes Web services but it includes Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring and so on. So, SOA is a collection of all these architectural concepts.

Delivering a service through an application vs. delivering it through SOA

A conventional application has a hard coded business process as a part of the application, there is just one way in and the data comes out in one way. With service oriented architecture, I am allowed to get services from anywhere and I can put a business process, architecture or a framework around that. So, it doesn’t matter to me if I get 70 percent of my services from that core application and other aspects of it from other places. For e.g. if I wanted to create a customer-centric application, I could retrieve all the customer demographic information from my HR application, I may retrieve some financial info about the customers from a different application.

Challenges in adopting SOA

The biggest challenge in SOA adoption is not about technology but the business processes. Some of the major obstacles for adoption have been that a business is not ready to reengineer its processes, Identifying a business rationale for SOA and Web Services; communicating the business rationale to senior management; needing a business partner or customer to request or require SOA and Web Services; uncertainty about industry standards for Web Services; ability to recruit and train a technical team; and what should be the steps before going for SOA adoption—these are some challenges.

First a company needs to develop a strategy. Many companies start working without a strategy and start doing things and later they realise where they have reached. The second thing is get the business involved with the IT. Companies who were able to do this have got more value. You have to figure out the best way to connect with a business and develop a strategy.

SOA standards

There are standards like XML, SOP that are standards for Web Services; there is BPEL (business process execution language). These are some of the standards adopted by major software vendors who have integrated them into their product line. Some of these standards have been there for as long as five years, they are pretty strong and are making SOA a reality and then we have some on the horizon that we think will take it to the next level.

Licensing vis-a-vis SOA?

Licensing is one of the major concerns for people. There has been an evolution of services wherein transactions can be monitored and companies would be paying per transaction charge of say two cents per transaction or something like that. Although it is not very common right now, however, it is evolving.