SOA Savings

Companies primarily deploy service oriented architecture to reap SOA savings, especially cost reductions from services reuse, and to gain IT agility to meet changing business needs. However, the potential for significant SOA application lifecycle cost savings is reduced for 33-50% of companies because of SOA operations and development problems. That's the conclusion of an Aberdeen Group report ("Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle," March 2007) based on a recent survey of 200 companies and surveys in 2006 of more than 900 companies.

Obstacles to SOA Savings

According to Aberdeen, key issues that threaten the potential for SOA application lifecycle savings include:

• Poor operational controls for the loosely coupled applications (including security)
• Inadequate controls over programmers—for creating, reusing, and modifying SOA applications
• Unanticipated deployment issues—including testing issues related to new Web services and SOA development methodologies
• Project management methodologies that haven't kept up with SOA development, testing, and deployment techniques

One key to addressing these problems—and leveraging the potential for SOA-based cost reduction—is employing adequate SOA management and governance technology.

Getting SOA Savings: Key Components of an SOA Application Lifecycle Solution

To get the full benefit of SOA integration along with SOA cost savings, IT executives need to develop their SOA application lifecycle solutions in three areas:

Operational management. SOA applications are typically composites made up of service components from existing legacy applications as well as new applications and Web services. These components can be reused in multiple SOA applications. The resulting complexity of application behavior (including application execution over heterogeneous computing resources), requires new techniques and technology to operate efficiently.

According to Aberdeen, key new areas that need to be addressed include:

• Integrating an SOA and its applications with existing management infrastructure to create "services-aware, end-to-end views of business processes"
• Developing new procedures for application debugging and recovery
• Using new testing methodologies and technology—to develop capacity planning benchmarks, performance tuning, and accurate response-time thresholds
• Incorporating SOA security into the enterprise security plan
• Developing service-aware quality of service requirements and creating service-level agreements that reflect SOA realities

Governance. Organizations need a decision and accountability framework throughout the application lifecycle, especially in the design and operations stages:

• Design time governance defines services, including who can use them during operations. This information is useful for promoting service reuse—and the greater the service reuse, the greater the IT savings.
• Operations or runtime governance functions include creating, modifying, and enforcing policies (including security, compliance, and business policies such as service-level agreements) including triggering events and actions, and monitoring service usage against design specifications.

Project management, development, and application lifecycle management tools. The SOA application lifecycle is different from prior software lifecycles because of the potential to reuse services. As a result, the SOA lifecycle revolves around familiar concepts and techniques adapted to a services-centric view and an eye for service reuse, as follows:

• Managing versions of services, including services based on legacy software—including understanding managing the impact of versioning and other changes on SOA operations and other services
• Fostering service reuse, quality, performance, and testing
• Using SOA debugging, performance management, and recovery techniques
• Integrating legacy custom programs, third-party enterprise software (such as ERP), and new application definition technology, such as business process management (BPM)

SOA Savings with Progress Actional

Progress Actional provides SOA management products that address many of these capabilities and help companies to build and deploy an SOA cost-effectively. For example, Progress Actional products provide service-aware visibility into end-to-end business processes for testing, quality assurance, and successful operations. These end-to-end views also yield an understanding of service usage and dependencies for capacity planning and versioning.

Progress Actional products also discover rogue services (unauthorized use of services and unauthorized services), and enable organizations to create, monitor, and alert on security, compliance, and business policies (such as SLAs) to ensure quality of services. By enabling successful operations, they encourage SOA expansion, including reuse of services—for SOA savings.

For More Information on Ensuring SOA Savings

For more information on obstacles to and solutions for getting double-digit SOA application lifecycle savings, download the Aberdeen Group white paper "Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Lifecycle" (March 2007).