What is SOA? Ahmed Mahmoud, vice president of IT global manufacturing fulfillment systems for Dell Inc. (www.dell.com), in Austin, Texas, describes SOA as a concept of building an application from loosely coupled applications.
Additional insight comes from Ari Bixhorn, director of Web Services strategy, and from Richard Turner, product manager, Web Services Group, both at Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com), in Redmond, Wash. “Service orientation is simply a methodology of building software—similar to object-oriented development and component-based development,” Bixhorn says. The result, according to Turner, is a more effective way to build decoupled, flexible, agile, interoperable services.
Make it modular
Sandy Rodgers, program director of SOA, Web Services and integration for industrial analyst company IDC, Framingham, Mass. (www.idc.com), notes that ideally, an SOA should be modular, with several layers of functional code, data, workflow and presentation interfaces.
SOA is a blueprint for evaluating software assets and how to reuse them for business flexibility, says Kareem Yusuf, director of SOA product management, in IBM Corp.’s (www.ibm.com) Software Group, located in Somers, N.Y. Emphasizing that SOA does not mean just Web Services, Yusuf says developing such architecture makes the user think about the service or services that he’s trying to offer and the reuse of software assets.
The most important thing to do when you are deciding whether to develop or use an SOA application, Yusuf adds, is to decompose your business processes into levels of activity. Simply put, to effectively use service-oriented architecture, managers must understand what the company does, Yusuf says. “And then when you understand your business processes, you need to know: What are the services that your IT infrastructure needs to develop to support those business processes?” He notes that the service definition is critical: What does the service do and how do you know what data it wishes to receive or what data it will return?
This architecture can improve profitability for manufacturers. SOA can and does spread to enterprise use, Yusuf says. “When you’re serious about doing SOA, it does begin to elevate up (in the enterprise), because it drives across projects.” Companies find common repositories for information and services, and they find the architecture’s usefulness in driving the way applications are going to be built and reused, he says.
IDC’s Rodgers notes that in an SOA environment, each element could be a provider or consumer of information. Speaking to the reuse-of-assets capability of SOA, she says, “You can more rapidly integrate a machine into the fold. You don’t have to change everything in the environment. You just deal with the interface.”
SOA may find use on a specific project or on several projects, but the wider application may be through Web Services. Microsoft’s Bixhorn says that while service orientation enables interoperable software, it’s simply the first step to creating a connected business. “With Web Services providing the foundation for integrated IT across a broad range of industries, customers are increasingly looking to go beyond SOA.” He believes that once end-users integrate their systems using Web Services, the big benefit comes from the ability to consume Web Services in a way that enhances their businesses.
C. Kenna Amos, [email protected], is an Automation World Contributing Editor
