Peer to Peer

Using SOA to Streamline Your Application Portfolio

Today’s business landscape demands flexibility and agility from both business processes and the IT systems that automate them. Companies rely on their application portfolio to run their business, but application portfolios can be an obstacle to implementing new business initiatives because integration is difficult and maintenance is costly.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) accommodates changing business processes so you can streamline your application portfolio and introduce the flexibility needed to keep up with the pace of the business.

Business Challenges

It’s challenging to support key applications that are based on disparate technologies, particularly when you’re dealing with declining support from technology vendors, shrinking budgets, and pressure to cut costs across the IT service spectrum. Supporting end-of-life technologies in the application portfolio forces you to keep resources dedicated to technologies that have reached their vendor-support horizon. In turn, this forces the technology expertise deeper into the organization and results in application silos and stunted employee growth.

This situation—coupled with the need to continuously innovate, support new business initiatives, and stay ahead of the technology curve—puts pressure on CIOs to properly deliver satisfactory end-user experiences within automated business processes.

As a result, opportunities are created to rationalize an organization’s application challenges, ease integration, and be more responsive to the changing needs of the business, while reducing overall application maintenance costs by leveraging Service-Oriented Architectures.

SOA: The Value to Your Organization

Ask ten different people in the IT industry how it’s changing, and you’ll hear ten different answers. Factors like new security requirements, mergers and acquisitions, electronic integration requirements, and emerging technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) make it difficult and expensive to stay ahead of the game. From an IT perspective, simplifying and streamlining the exchange of information allows your organization to become more agile, more available to your customers, and better able to respond to change.

Specifically designed for flexibility and reuse, an SOA enables you to easily integrate systems, data, applications, and processes through linking services. An SOA enables uncomplicated connectivity by abstracting dependencies away from each application into a Web service. Applications can then easily be connected through modular components. Each application can be modified whenever necessary to support flexible and dynamic business processes through platform-independent, standardized interfaces.

SOA allows your team to create powerful applications and systems that retain enough flexibility for you to add or remove services when the need arises, without taking offline other features of the application. Building applications based on SOA allows you to easily upgrade, version, and replace component services when your application and business needs evolve. Forrester Research has estimated that an SOA approach can reduce application maintenance by 30 percent or more.^[1]

More Than SOA

Portfolio Transformation is one path toward SOA. Portfolio Transformation provides the opportunity to rationalize a set of existing applications (streamline, combine multiple applications, add new functionality) into a set of modern, connected applications. Applications designed around the SOA principles offer immediate gains in terms of reuse, integration, and scalability. This allows IT teams to do more with less, a plateau that was dreamt of but not achievable with previous technologies. As a means to get to SOA, Portfolio Transformation offers benefits that go beyond implementing SOA. The opportunity to address the changing nature of your business, whether driven by the need to enable an effective supply chain, going through a merger or acquisition, or making a strategic move away from old, end-of-life technologies, makes Portfolio Transformation a very attractive option. Renewing your application portfolio to take advantage of modern, scalable architectures (such as SOA) and efficient technologies (such as .NET) delivers cost savings and properly positions your organization for inevitable change.

Achieving Success

Effectively rationalizing an application portfolio and transforming it with an SOA presents several challenges.

• Managing services metadata. This is a common challenge. SOA-based environments can include many services that exchange messages to perform tasks. Depending on the design, a single application may generate millions of messages. Managing and providing information on how services interact is a complicated task. This challenge can be mitigated by a close working relationship between the systems integrator and the customer’s system owners.
• Providing appropriate security. Another challenge is to provide appropriate levels of security. The security model built into an application may no longer be appropriate when the capabilities of the application are exposed as services that can be used by other applications. Rationalizing your organization’s systems to make use of an SOA requires an intensive audit of your application security systems.
• Shortage of skilled people. As SOA and the Web services-specifications are expanded, updated and refined, there is a shortage of skilled people to work on SOA-based systems, including the integration of services and construction of services infrastructure. You need to consider where to find and how to retain skilled resources to renew and maintain the new SOA.
• High expectations. Vendor hype about SOA can create expectations that may not be fulfilled. Product stacks are still evolving as early adopters test the development and runtime products with real world problems. SOA does not guarantee reduced IT costs, improved systems agility, or faster time to market. Rather, successful SOA implementations realize some or all of these benefits depending on the quality and relevance of the system architecture and design. An in-depth analysis of the current systems and how they might benefit from an SOA is required to understand its value.

A successful SOA implementation requires, in many cases, a cultural shift that must occur to get the organization on track, both technically and from a process perspective. The proper approach to a move toward SOA must consider the need for properly trained technologists, proven tools and assets built on the appropriate technologies, and a process that will guide your organization through the changes needs to realize the benefits of an SOA.

Conclusion

Challenges to support application portfolios based on diverse and disparate technologies with declining support from the technology vendors, ever-shrinking budgets, and increased pressures to cut costs across the IT service spectrum are driving businesses to reevaluate their application portfolios.

Implementing SOAs across an application portfolio provides the flexibility and agility you need to change and adapt to new business demands, while reducing overall application maintenance costs.