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Integration Tomorrow, Part 2: SOA Architecture

Thoughts from the Integration Consortium

This month's column was contributed by Yogish Pai, Integration Consortium member and SOA practitioner.

Part 1 of the two-part series described the past and current integration approaches. This second part, takes a practical approach on how technology is going to change business landscape and the potential infrastructure changes required to integrate the business both at business and IT levels.

Future of IT

The IT organization of the future shall be substantially different than what it is today. IT organization shall be used as a change agent by business executives to transform their business. Only those IT organizations that are able to transform themselves shall survive and the other shall either perish or be outsourced. Following are the two important factors that shall impact the IT organizations:

  • Even thought BPM + SOA enables business alignment and flexibility, it also create a lot of interdependencies between systems, services, etc. and if not properly managed this environment could be very brittle leading to disaster. It is for this reason it is import for IT organizations to put in place a robust and reliable SOA governance process right from the beginning.
  • Most of the IT organizations, especially for small and medium enterprises, shall primarily focus their effort on the integration. Ideally, these organizations would no longer host any packaged applications in house, instead they would recommend business to leverage an application from one of the software as a service (SaaS) provider. The primary task of the IT organizations would be to implement business processes across these solutions, manage enterprise data such as customers, products, orders, and so on; basically focus on integrating the enterprise.

SOA Governance

There are two aspects associated with SOA Governance, one is the funding model and other is the management/operations model. It is very important for IT organizations, especially the enterprise architects, to focus on developing and demonstrating the potential business value of SOA prior to being funded. This includes putting together an easy simple to understand funding model for the business executives. Following is one of the successful approaches leveraged by IT organizations.

Figure 1

This is basically a three-tiered model, where the lowest level is the most universal and generic infrastructure which is funded as tax across all the business units (similar to the networks, email, etc.). The second level is the shared set of business services that is funded jointly by one or more organizations. The important thing to remember is that even though one of the business units may not use the shared business services right up front, it has been observed that the second business unit would be willing to fund it, provided they know that one of their business applications shall require that services (recommend that this horizon been less than one year). The top most tier is the least universal or a set of services that specific only to one of the business units and shall also be fund by that business unit. Evangelizing such as model during the annual budget planning cycle shall increases the success of getting the SOA projects funded.

Once the funding is approved, it is important that the organizations focus on managing the SOA program. This shall require organizations to adopt SOA governance tools that include both the BPM and Repository capability. This is to enable organizations to fine tune their governance processes as well as reduce/eliminate deployment of redundant services. Most of the major software vendors already have SOA Governance tools and have also published their best practices and common patterns. The recommendation for IT organizations would be to leverage these patterns as a base and customize it to meet their specific requirements.

Following are some of the high-level requirements for an SOA governance tool:

  • Ability to customize the governance process, preferably using a browser;
  • Governance process engine independent of the repository;
  • Federation, as large enterprises shall potentially have multiple instances;
  • Metadata repository, especially based on meta object facility (OMG standard);
  • Ability to map dependencies between the various meta data and artifacts;
  • Manage multiple versions of the meta data and artifacts;
  • Ability to create and manage assets; and
  • Integration with financial applications, application portfolio management systems and CMDB.

Following are the list of factors that shall impact the business integration in the future:

Exponential Explosions of Events

As enterprise start adopting SOA and new technologies such as RFID, location-based services, Web 2.0 and multimedia; these systems shall continuously generate a lot of events. In today's integration efforts most of the business rules could be captured and automated. However, this approach shall not be sufficient in the future, especially as business would want to interact to any environment change very rapidly.

Enterprises need to start looking at adopting event servers to handle some existing events and as the number of events increase, the event server should be able to detect various patterns and proactively recommend action without business having to spell out every scenario possible to IT (which would be next to impossible to do). Multiple standards groups are currently working on the standards for the event-driven architecture but are still a year or two away from defining them. In short, pick a vendor/product that meets your specific needs expecting the vendor to support the standard in a few years.

Commoditization of Technology

Today large e-business and search engine sites develop specialized software to handle large volumes and run on high-end hardware. Over the period of time the software vendors are expected to develop software that shall run on low-end commodity servers (x86 based server); basically a grid of commodity servers. It would be important to watch the progress made by The Open Grid Forum and potentially adopt some of their recommendations.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Enterprises shall not only leverage SaaS for business application but shall do so, on a periodic basis, for processor power, disk spaces, etc. Business applications such as ERP, CRM and e-business suites have been provided by the SaaS vendors for quite a while and integrating with them is straight forward. One would advice caution before leveraging on-demand infrastructure providers, especially due to lack of standards.

Mapping Dependencies

As IT organizations shall be leveraging SaaS for infrastructure too, it becomes very import for to map the dependencies right from the business process to the set servers and disks used that support it. This basically makes it necessary for IT organizations to adopt a metadata repository to map the entire grid. In addition, it is imperative that the business services (components) are built modular in nature and limit their dependencies to each other. Once again, monitoring The Open Grid Forum would be beneficial.

In conclusion, IT shall be leveraged as a change agent to transform the business. IT transformation is imperative for business to compete; its survival may depend on it. At the same time, IT needs to also keep an eye on the upcoming standards and infrastructure and pick the right ones.


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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