Service-oriented architecture (SOA) may no longer be the hot new thing that it was a few years ago, but the Web-based infrastructure remains very popular, according to industry players.
Its roots began over two decades ago, in the early days of software integration, before it evolved into component-based development in the late 1990s. Back then, interfaces such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) were used to enable software components to communicate.
Today, SOA is a methodology that uses open standards such as Web services, which allows organizations to build more flexible IT infrastructures that respond more quickly to changing business needs.
What makes SOA so compelling for organizations?
U.S.-based Gene Phifer, who is Gartner's vice president and distinguished analyst, offered some insights over a phone interview with ZDNet Asia. According to him, SOA still generates the highest level of client enquiries.
Companies are keen on SOA because it is "built as a collection of services", and as such, allows companies to be more responsive to change, Phifer said.
"Organizations can consume these services one at a time and assemble those to [suit] their needs," he said. "[SOA] gives them more agility to respond to changes." He added that these changes can come in the form of mergers, new government regulations, and so on.
On a deeper level, SOA provides companies with the ability to take processes "buried in the bowels of application suites like SAP, Oracle, and homegrown apps", and expose and consume those applications at a very granular level, as well as model those processes very easily, he explained.
"Anything that changes can do that much better if the system is architected in SOA," he said.
Standards and interoperability
Another key aspect of SOA is that because it is built upon Web services, it enables organizations, and their ecosystem of business partners and customers to interoperate freely.
Pointing out that the SOA concept has been around since the 1980s, Phifer attributed its popularity as being ignited by the development of Web services in the early years of this decade. "You can think of it as the spark that lit the fire," he said.
Web services, popularized around 2001, are pieces of software that can communicate with another application over a network by using a specific set of standard protocols. These include Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) framework, and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
Peter Murchison, vice president of WebSphere Software at IBM Asia-Pacific, said: "With business processes supported by an SOA foundation, a company can make its previously-siloed data and software applications better interoperate across business units, as well as with third parties."
Echoing what Phifer mentioned earlier, Murchison told ZDNet Asia that "things like mergers, regulations, global competition, outsourcing and partnering have resulted in a massive increase in the number of applications a company may use".
The usual scenario would be that companies built applications with little knowledge of other applications that could be added in the future, and required to share information with existing applications, he said. And as a result, businesses are now struggling to maintain IT systems that co-exist, but are not integrated, he noted. Or if they are integrated, they are rigidly so, he added.
Murchison said: "Now just think about how many duplicate processes are occurring in separate departments and applications--and how much these duplicate processes are costing them."
And that is where SOA comes in, allowing businesses to provide standardized services and business processes, and thus enabling them to run their IT infrastructure more smoothly, he said. He added that this also frees up more energy for organizations to focus on their core businesses.
Tough to get right
But for all the simplification SOA promises to provide, implementing it is not a walk in the park.
The SOA landscape is now littered with middleware vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and application server vendors including BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems.
Traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors such as Tibco and WebMethods also offer SOA products. Smaller pure-play vendors such as SOA Software, have also come into the market.
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