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Integration Approaches Based on Service Orientation

Thoughts from the Integration Consortium

Shashank Tanksali, senior manager at Wipro Technologies, contributed this month's article.

Integration in an SOA World

With the dust having finally settled on the initial hype around service-oriented architecture (SOA), IT managers are increasingly looking to transform SOA investments into quick practical wins to demonstrate short term return on investment (ROI) and ensure continued management commitment to SOA initiatives. One of the most effective ways to achieve this goal is by undertaking integration initiatives that capitalize on the underlying services infrastructure.

Even though there are numerous standards pertaining to various aspects of integration such as messaging, the integration arena has traditionally been proprietary, expensive and without a doubt one of the most complex aspects involved in any IT initiative. Service-oriented integration (SOI) as the name implies involves achieving integration between various IT systems using service interactions.

Drivers for SOI

One of the biggest drivers towards SOI has been the cost of integration. Integration is expensive and inherently complex requiring specialized knowledge of the systems being integrated. SOI significantly reduces the cost of integration by abstracting the inherent complexity associated with the systems being integrated through a service interface. As a result of this abstraction, an integration developer only needs to understand how to bind to the service provided by the system being integrated.

Another significant driver towards SOI is the amount of complexity inherent in most integration architectures today. An SOI approach reduces a lot of this complexity by introducing cleaner interfaces across systems and businesses.

In addition, most organizations are increasingly reluctant to invest in products that are not standards based. After all, who would buy a car from a manufacturer, if the only tires that would fit on the car are made by the manufacturer himself? This has spurred the interest in integration architectures that embody the principles of service orientation.

SOI allows existing legacy IT assets, found in most organizations to be exposed as services, thereby making the assets available to the rest of the organization or even outside the organization and giving a new lease of life to existing legacy investments. In situations where complex business logic is embedded in legacy systems that needs to be consumed by newer applications, exposing legacy system functionality using standardized service interfaces can enable the rapid development of new applications. In addition, exposing legacy functionality as service interfaces allows the legacy system to be an active participant in the enterprise architecture, thereby allowing the legacy system to be monitored and managed through its service interface.

One advantage of exposing existing functionality as services this way and using service oriented integration techniques is that it allows organizations to adopt an evolutionary approach to SOA. In addition, techniques and best practices that are developed for intra-application integration, such as application assembly, using services can also be applied to inter application integration and possibly B2B integration as well.

SOI Challenges

While many aspects of integration become simpler when using an SOI approach to integration, there are new challenges that are introduced. At the heart of almost any integration effort is the issue of interoperability. Due to the standardized nature of service interfaces, interoperability issues are mainly centered on the payload rather than on the underlying communication aspects. However, new challenges such as distributed transaction management and system performance are introduced when SOI techniques are used to accomplish integration. Aspects of security still pose a challenge even though the security standards have come a long way in the last few years.

Another challenge pertaining to SOI involves exposing service interfaces for legacy systems. While exposing a service interface is often not a challenge in itself, a thorough legacy analysis needs to be done before introducing the legacy system as a participant in an SOA. For example, exposing a service interface could potentially allow multiple concurrent requests to be sent to the legacy system, which it might not be designed to handle.

Probably, the biggest barrier to SOI is probably the lack of a semantic vocabulary in most organizations and industry domains. In other words, the systems being integrated using a service interface need to have an underlying understanding of the data being exchanged and the meaning of the data in the context of that service interaction.

Even though it is clear that SOI will not solve all Integration challenges, organizations embarking on SOA initiatives should resort to integration approaches based on service orientation as it is not very different from assembling an application using services. For organizations looking at making their first foray into SOA, SOI can be a stepping stone and can provide an evolutionary pathway to an architecture based on the principles of service orientation.

For most organizations, while there is an upfront cost associated with re-architecting existing systems to provide service interfaces that are required for an SOI approach, the potential long-term ROI that can be realized through a simpler standards based architecture can more than justify the initial upfront cost.

With architectures based on the principles of service orientation becoming more and more common, it is just a matter of time before integration using SOI techniques will be the de facto way of accomplishing integration.


The Integration Consortium is a non-profit, leading industry body responsible for influencing the direction of the integration industry. Its members champion Integration Acumen by establishing standards, guidelines, best practices, research and the articulation of strategic and measurable business benefits. The Integration Consortium's motto is "Forging Integration Value." The mission of the member-driven Integration Consortium is to establish universal seamless integration which engages industry stakeholders from the business and technology community. Among the sectors represented in the Integration Consortium membership are end-user corporations, independent software vendors (ISVs), hardware vendors, system integrators, academic institutions, non-profit institutions and individual members as well as various industry leaders. Information on the Integration Consortium is available at www.integrationconsortium.org.

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