SOA Basics: Business Benefits

IT agility is one of the main concerns for today's complex enterprises. Even the most well planned IT infrastructures face significant challenges introduced by mergers, acquisitions, and rapid growth of the enterprise. This discussion covers SOA basics, explaining how companies, in order to increase efficiency, must phase out functional silos that incorporate overlapping and duplicate processes and add complexity to their IT infrastructure.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides the framework to re-architect IT infrastructure, eliminate redundancy and accelerate project delivery via consolidation and reuse of services (often referred to as Web services). SOAs can adapt quickly to changing business needs, deliver new IT projects faster at lower service costs, and reduce ongoing IT administrative and infrastructure expenditures.

In a SOA, applications are not built as standalone monolithic silos. Instead, business-relevant services (e.g. customer, ordering, inventory, etc.) are either built new or layered on top of existing applications. Then, project specific application logic is built on top of the services in a separate architectural tier. This alignment of IT and business processes and services is what leads to the benefits of SOA:

• By building services, they can be leveraged across multiple projects – reducing redundancy and avoiding the need to rebuild functionality in new projects. This helps deliver projects faster and lowers ongoing costs.
• By decoupling project specific application logic from the services, it enables flexibility as this logic can be easily changed, updated, or even replaced to address new business needs – combining the underlying services in new ways without having to change or rewrite them. This leads to business agility as well as lower cost over time.

The benefits are compelling but SOA also changes the dynamics of IT by introducing interdependencies across projects, applications, and even IT teams. Historically, allowing project teams to be autonomous drove accountability to the project teams and managed risk by limiting the external interactions. In contrast, the benefits of SOA in many ways are derived from external interactions (using services built by other project teams). These two worlds must be brought together without falling into the traps that exist at either extreme: A brittle, unreliable, and difficult to maintain spaghetti of application interconnections which can occur when project teams are left to build and use services without the right controls in place; or, at the other extreme, a central organization whose job is to connect applications together which becomes a bottleneck for project teams, reduces accountability and increases the risks for project success.

Because of the changes required and unique pitfalls of SOA, before moving to a SOA architecture, careful SOA planning is essential. SOA migration is incremental, leveraging existing applications that deliver value while building new applications and services. This generates a complex heterogeneous environment that avoids the "rip and replace" approach and focuses on building new services only when a new opportunity arises or existing solutions do not deliver the necessary results.

SOA Basics: In a Nutshell

The benefits of SOA include IT agility, faster time to deployment, business process visibility and more. By carefully planning your move to SOA you can easily avoid a costly rip-and-replace approach – and preserve the benefits you hope to gain.

For More Information

Learn more about SOA – read the free white paper, SOA Introduction: IT and Business Perspectives