SOA Success, One Integration Project at a Time

SOA in Action Blog

« SOA Threatens a Quaint 20th Century Practice -- Double Data Entry | Main | Two Quick-Win SOA Projects »

March 05, 2007

SOA Success, One Integration Project at a Time

SOA success doesn't come all at once -- it's built incrementally, usually starting with some type of integration project. Kicking off last week's Skyway Webinar (hosted and archived here at ebizQ), Mike Gilpin of Forrester Research spoke at length about the common characteristics of the SOA projects he has seen succeeding at enterprise sites. I had the opportunity to moderate the session, in which Mike joined Jared Rodriguez, CTO of Skyway Software, for a discussion on how to succeed with SOA deployments.

Most SOA initiatives initially begin as integration projects, Mike pointed out. "One of the key ways that SOA tends to come into organizations is as a way to deal with integration problems," he explained. Such segways evolve out of "trying to work with a business partner through an interface today that would tend to be Web services-based; integration with back end systems, ERP. CRM, or other systems; or more focused toward front-end activities, such as content management or Web self service; or multi-channel integration of user experiences across Web, call center, email, devices, interactive voice response."

Typically, Mike added, "each of those individual technology areas tended to be addressed from an integration perspective in a different unique stovepiped way. You might have one Web-to-host approach that would be used to integrate a customer front-end application to a front-end, and a different approach used to integrate with partners."

SOA brings all these efforts together, he said. "With SOA, you start by building services in the middle, which are a representation of your business in digital form."

However, there are many ways to service-orient a system -- in fact, Forrester has identified a number of paths that can be followed, often in combination. First, there's "simple internal integration of a provider of a service with a consumer of a service without an intermediary" through a lightweight ESB, Mike said. The next step up is "rich.. internal integration through an intermediary that is providing transformation and guaranteed delivery, filtering, routing, and other kinds of value add. This may be more of the more functionally rich ESBs, which is also providing capabilities for semantic mapping and management features."

Model-driven development is another key positive attribute of successful SOA implementation projects, Mike pointed out. "Modeling not just in the old sense of pictures with boxes and lines, but modeling in the new sense of a model is metadata that defines the behavior of the application. Where that metadata is entered in development tools, perhaps through a visual representation, or perhaps through a form. That then survives into the runtime environment, and becomes part of the deployed application."

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us