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SOA: Loud and Clear

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

There has been plenty of talk about today's dynamic business environment and

much has been written about it. Organizations face various challenges that force

them to undergo dramatic changes to grow and be more profitable. These

challenges include fierce competition from rivals, ever-changing requirements

for regulatory compliance, pressure to create new business areas and increase

customer base, to innovate and generate new sources of revenue. To overcome

these challenges, organizations must change and adapt quickly to new trends

without adversely affecting their core business functionalities. For this to

happen they have to move out of the shackles of having siloed applications for

different business processes towards a more flexible and seamless business

environment, where business processes are more integrated as well as flexible to

changing requirements. SOA has emerged as a dominant technology for supporting

such business transformations.

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Applies To:

System architects, IT decision makers



USP: Integrate various business processes
seamlessly



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Google Keywords: SOA

Why SOA?



Software engineers know from the beginning of their software development

cycle that software which changes frequently should be decoupled from software

that changes infrequently. This principle, when applied to the information

management of an organization, becomes SOA. However, it is the practice of

isolating core business functionalities into independent services that doesn't

change frequently. These services are functions that are called by one or more

presentation programs, and are nothing but interfaces that present data to and

also accept data from users. To make things more clear about services, let's

take an example of an online store. Visitors who browse the website of such a

store are presented with content on their browsers through presentation

software. This software interprets visitors/ customers gestures and

correspondingly invokes services that retrieve data of the product catalog that

a customer is viewing or for registering a customer's order basket. The services

that are called do not know that they are talking to a website; they could

easily be talking to a thick client or even some other application such as an

ERP solution. These services simply accept and return data in a standard format.

Now since change is part of life, the website too may undergo change with time.

The presentation interface may be changed for different layouts or to

incorporate new technologies such as Ajax. But none of this has to do anything

with the core business functionalities that are encapsulated by these

independent services that we talked about earlier. Similarly, if there is a

change to the business logic, then these services have to be worked upon without

changing the presentation software.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a framework that supports

transformation of an organization's business into a set of linked services,

reusable and repeatable business tasks, which can be accessed over a network, be

it a local intranet or the Internet. These services coalesce to achieve a

specific business task of the organization.

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The data of enterprise apps is integrated to

create a coherent service interface that connects people, processes and

business partners

Implementation scenarios



Two key benefits from an SOA implementation are: alignment of IT with

business processes; and the ability to maximize the reuse of IT assets. So, the

question arises: How should an organization tap into SOA? Let's take an example

of a manufacturing company. Manufacturers have to respond to customer demands in

time and also, to improve profitability, they must reduce complexities in

business and manufacturing processes. To manage different business processes,

they adopt various applications, such as SCM for production management, CRM for

vendor and customer related information management, etc. But each of these

applications is restricted to their own domain, thus forming an obstacle for

seamless information flow. Moreover, a manufacturer would like to integrate his

supply chain with trading partners for better delivery of products, so that

inventory shortfall or an urgent business contract demand could be met in time.

With the implementation of SOA, the manufacturing company shall be able to

integrate their various legacy systems by adopting a presentation framework that

would enable data flow across these disparate systems, through a standard

format, such as XML. And through the use of Web Services, they can collaborate

or exchange information with their trading partners for business processes

related to inventory management over the Internet. Thus, by implementing SOA, a

manufacturing organization can achieve end-to-end manufacturing process

integration, and have just one overall interface for the organization's business

intelligence, coming from various information stores of disparate applications

such as SCM and CRM. This in return streamlines their business process right

from material procurement to production and finally the delivery of the product

to customer.

SOA implementation can be done at various stages by an organization. IBM has

defined five entry-points. These points are driven by both business and IT needs

for an organization. The entry points relating to business needs of an

organization are:

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hrough a common framework of services, various

biz apps and platform techs can be integrated to exchange information
  • People: Focus on user experience, to enhance collaboration and to

    improve business productivity.
  • Process: Focus on the present business model to transform business

    processes into reusable services and to optimize business processes.
  • Information: Leverage the business information to all functional

    areas of the business.

The entry points pertaining to IT needs of an organization include:

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  • Connectivity: Effectively connect the infrastructure; integrating

    people, processes and information in the organization and also to connect to

    communicate with external trading partners beyond an organization's firewall.
  • Reuse: Focus on reusing existing services and cutting down on

    duplication that results in reduced development time and ensure consistency

    across all business processes in the organization.

Such entry points help an organization to think and strategize their business

needs and objectives to be fulfilled by means of SOA implementation.



For any organization, that is planning to move ahead with SOA, understanding
this baseline perspective becomes really important; to decide what business

processes should be configured to incorporate SOA. A proper SOA implementation

for an organization or business would result in seamless information flow across

heterogeneous applications, platforms and transmission protocols.

e-Governance in Goa
To better understand the need

and benefits of having SOA, let's look at a recent e-governance solution

implemented by the Goa government. To improve government-to-citizen

services, the government offers integrated services under one roof through

Citizen Service Centers (CSC) and Web portals. 3i Infotech was given the

task to develop an integrated solution for the payment of water bills,

electricity bills, issuance of certificates for birth or land records, etc.

A total of 15 separate services are to be brought under one site, to provide

citizens with anytime and anywhere access to these services. The departments

involved in the implementation include: electricity, commercial taxes,

transport, public works, land settlement and records, municipal

administration and the various panchayats-all with different databases and

platforms.



Adoption of SOA based products and solutions would have addressed specific
business problems related to the development of applications for seamless

access of various services by citizens. BEA's WebLogic, AquaLogic Service

Bus and the Data Service Platform were chosen for the purpose. The Data

Services Platform, essentially due to its SOA-based architecture, allowed 3i

Infotech to create Web services in an integrated manner. The robustness and

the Open Standards nature of the platform meant that integration would be

quite seamless. For connecting services from heterogeneous processes,

service bus platform was used for tight coupling and service mediation.



And through the WebLogic portal, various user interfaces for different
services could be put under one application. Thus, a portal with various

government services could be offered to citizens at one place, rather than

the latter having to open different applications on multiple windows.



The adoption of SOA resulted in integration of different government
services, without having to rework on the code for each application. This

portal has resulted in reduced administration burden over these services and

also reduced costs of infrastructure, monitoring and database management for

the Goa government.


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