More evidence that SOA implementations are moving closer to an enterprise data management role: The Stanwell Corporation recently began a project intended to integrate and provide quick access to data currently stored in siloed IT systems.
In a new ComputerWorld interview, Stanwell enterprise technology architect Greg Behrendt said the new platform will synchronize data from numerous sources throughout the enterprise and transform it into real-time information. "We will have access to information we can act upon and update straight away; this will save us time and money by streamlining business processes and accessing information from one location," he is quoted as saying. Stanwell turned to BEA's AquaLogic Enterprise Service Bus and data services platform to undertake the project.
Perhaps the Stanwell and BEA folks read ebizQ's own David Kelly a few months back, when he so succinctly made the SOA-data connection a few months back, observing that "any organization considering or pursuing SOA should also be creating a data services strategy....Simply put, putting together the right data services are an important strategic investment for organizations pursuing SOA."
While data warehouses and data marts are intended to accomplish this de-silozation of information, they need middleware support to effectively disperse the data to the right parts of the business through the right applications. "There's an ever-growing need for delivering data, especially from multiple, disjointed sources, in real-time," David explained. Thus, data needs to be moved closer to the applications, and applications need to be moved closer to the data, and somewhere in the middle they meet. What a killer role for SOA.
There is a good role for SOA in working on data, but not the one suggested. Sychronization is interfaces that try to update redundant copies, with different identities and different versions of what is truly one business object. This is crazy and creates a whole lot of business pain.
SOA should be used to manage the integrity of create and update actions to a single enterprise data store for each enterprise object. Each application then shares the same enterprise data store and objects. The data is in synch because it exists once in one place.
There is clearly a need for SOA data services. Some very good solutions already exist, such as Composite Software for example, and (sorry for the shameful self-promotion) our open source project xaware.org, which has at least 15,000 existing users. Bill Miller, www.xaware.com