SOA Selection: A Framework

Making the right SOA selection involves choosing a vendor whose SOA vision you share and considering three issues: technology integration and interoperability, best-of-breed versus platform solutions, and implementation experience. Sharing a SOA vision with your vendor is critical for ensuring your SOA Technology is aligned with your business goals.

In addition, here are some key issues whose resolution will ensure that you can easily and successfully deploy an initial, practical SOA and then evolve it successfully over time.

SOA Selection Guideline I: Anticipate "Cross-Cutting" Concerns

SOAs typically connect heterogeneous systems and execute business processes that are distributed across and even beyond enterprise boundaries. That means that integration and interoperability are critical for SOA success. As a result, you need to anticipate the cross-cutting concerns or connections that SOA infrastructure must address and manage. As an illustration, here are just two of the questions you need to ask yourself when developing your SOA:

• How do I support integration of new and existing business applications across organizational boundaries and to remote sites?
• How do I enforce security, compliance, and business policy across multiple services?

Progress products are designed to address these, and other, cross-cutting issues. They are built for optimal integration and interoperability—and are also modular, for scalable SOA adoption. They allow companies to deploy a practical SOA that includes today's existing systems and can scale, by stages:

• The Progress® Sonic ESB® Product Family: provides a cohesive, standards-based solution to the challenge of broad scale integration. Sonic ESB integrates large, physically distributed deployments--with complex service orchestration, operational data management, and seamless interoperability with third-party relational data sources, packaged applications, and technologies. Other Sonic products simplify application integration within an SOA.
• The Progress® Actional® SOA Management Product Family: provides a comprehensive management solution that gives you visibility, security, and control of activities and end-to-end business processes that execute in heterogeneous, distributed environments. As an SOA foundation, Actional tracks business processes across the boundaries of diverse applications, data sources, and systems. It also allows you to centrally manage security and compliance policies for consistent, complete coverage across diverse applications’ processes while enforcing policies on the network.
• The Progress® DataXtend™ Product Family: provides data integration across the boundaries of heterogeneous, distributed environments. They employ a common semantic data model to create sophisticated data transformations, enabling organizations to integrate heterogeneous data sources with no disruptions to existing systems.

SOA Selection Guideline II: Application Platform versus Best-in-Class Vendors

A second key SOA selection issue is whether to acquire SOA infrastructure from an application platform vendor as part of a broader offering or to partner with a best-in-class vendor whose strategic focus is on the SOA capabilities required at the intersection between platforms, departments, and organizations.

Application platform vendors provide functionality that is important to many enterprises. However, a variety of challenges occur related to "cross-cutting" or integration concerns. To name just one problem, application vendors define your infrastructure around their platform and provide limited interoperability with systems beyond their own, except though standards support. For example, when these vendors supply the SOA communications infrastructure, performance at platform boundaries suffers. In addition, monitoring and management outside of their platform is second order and enforcing policy outside their container or platform is labor-intensive.

In contrast, Progress, as a best-in-class SOA infrastructure provider focuses on the requirements that emerge at platform, department, or organization boundaries. Progress places the challenges of the diverse, heterogeneous, distributed SOA world at the design center. For example:

• Sonics ESB delivers unmatched performance for messaging and service interactions in this SOA world.
• Actional products offer automatic end-to-end SOA monitoring and central management and distributed enforcement of policies.
• DataXtend Semantic Integrator ensures consistency in the meaning and representation of data in the SOA environment, where information crosses multiple schema and system-of-record boundaries.

SOA Selection Guideline III: Vendor Experience

Finally, vendor experience should be an important criterion in your SOA selection. An experienced vendor can transform the technology into an offering that delivers the full business benefit of SOA.

Progress has worked with customers in hundreds of SOA projects. Based on this experience, it offers not only robust service and support, but best practices and methodologies, as well as a SOA Maturity Model, to help you structure a successful path from developing reusable Web services to an enterprise that can optimize business processes.

For More Information

For a more complete decision framework to help you select and build a practical SOA for your company—including a full list of key questions to consider—download " >The Right Infrastructure for SOA: A Practical Path to Success and ROI."