Gartner, the technology research firm, predicts that "by 2006, more than 60 percent of the $527 billion IT professional services market will be based on the exploitation of Web services standards and technologies." Now, that is cause to celebrate. Web services currently are the preferred interface for implementing service-oriented architectures (SOA).
SOA describes an approach to software in which chunks of functionality are handled as discrete services. What was once a monolithic application, such as an ERP system or CRM application, is now broken down into its constituent functions, such as an inventory availability or customer credit processing, and presented as a service. Every time a system needs to check for inventory or needs to confirm customer credit, it simply requests the appropriate service. The services communicate with the systems and among themselves using a set of well-defined, widely accepted, standardized protocols and interfaces.
The big payoff of SOA comes in two areas. First, it simplifies the integration of different systems. Instead of slow, costly, point-to-point integration or nearly as expensive EAI initiatives, systems share data and functionality via XML messages. They don't have to know how the data is stored or formatted or how the service performs its work. The data is exchanged using XML, which each system can translate into its own native format and syntax once it arrives. As for the service function, no one cares how it checks credit or inventory as long as it does the job and fires off an XML message containing the correct response. As a result, SOA promises to speed systems integration and lower the cost.
Second, SOA enables business agility by making it easy to change systems or, more likely, assemble new systems to meet changing business needs. With SOA, you won't build the new system from scratch, which would take years. Instead, you simply assemble the application by recombining services as needed. You take the necessary customer services and production services and add a new service for the particular thing that changed. Presto, you have a new composite application — although only a very small part of it actually is completely new. Everything else relies on the reuse of existing services. Through SOA, organizations will be able to change their systems almost as fast as the business changes. Now, that's business agility.
At least this is the promise of SOA. If it sounds a bit familiar, you're right. The IT industry has seen this before. Object-oriented programming and object-broker architectures were supposed to deliver this kind of repurposing, but objects proved too detailed and too low-level to allow the necessary business abstraction. "Objects were hardwired and hard to use and expensive," says Michael Liebow, vice president for SOA and Web Services at IBM Business Consulting Services, which is part of its Global Services organization.
Component-based development promised to do the same thing. If objects were too granular, components were too large. They tried to encompass too much functionality. "We're doing research now to try to get a reasonable determination of how many function points should be included in a service. At this point, all we can say is that it should be bigger than an object and smaller than an application," says Don Rippert, CTO, Accenture. In addition, components-based development, which often encapsulated an entire application, lacked the widely accepted standards of today's SOA.
Gartner definitely is bullish on SOA. In a February 2005 report titled Positions 2005: Service-Oriented Architecture Adds Flexibility to Business Processes, the research firm declared "the emergence of SOA based on Web services represents a shift in the dominant software paradigm, comparable to the shift from terminal-based to client/server architectures." In the report, Gartner predicted that SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of new development projects by 2008. By that time, SOA will enable organizations to increase code reuse by more than 100 percent. And Gartner doesn't stop there. "Through 2015, service-oriented architecture will transform software from an inhibitor to an enabler of business change," according to the report.
With such heady predictions, the large IT consulting firms are ramping up SOA activities, but they won't be alone. "You will see a lot of boutique firms doing SOA professional services work. You also will see the big commercial application vendors, companies like SAP and Oracle, move into this area," says Judith Hurwitz, principal, Hurwitz & Associates, Waltham, MA. She often describes the emerging SOA arena as a dual of the software titans. But that's not discouraging the consulting firms.
BearingPoint sees demand for SOA building first in the financial services industry. "We are seeing it in response to regulatory reporting and things like Check 21 [a check clearing regulation]," says Peter Nikonovich, the firm's managing director for retail banking. SOA, he notes, can "reduce the overall cost of the system and, especially, the cost of maintaining the system." Today, different systems often perform the same function, "which is not cost effective," he adds. "In SOA, one service will perform the function for all applications that need it."
The firm's approach is to leverage legacy systems by breaking them into services. "We reuse the existing assets of the organization. But the difference with SOA is that we look more horizontally from a process perspective," Nikonovich explains. Services can then be used across processes. Accenture, too, has moved quickly to establish its SOA credentials. "We have a number of customer engagements doing SOA projects. Most of the industry is at the point where they are just writing XML as the interface. We've moved way past that first stage," says Rippert. The firm maintains a core group of about 250 technical architects whom it puts on the biggest, most critical, SOA projects. Outside of that core group, however, "SOA is broadly practiced throughout Accenture," he notes.
The firm also was quick to recognize the key role the big enterprise application vendors will play in SOA, especially when it comes to determining which functions are best suited as reusable services. "We think that companies like SAP and Oracle will break this ground first. We have worked with SAP on NetWeaver and SOA," says Rippert.
Avanade, an Accenture joint venture with Microsoft, also is jumping into the SOA race. "SOA is very much a Microsoft game. The Microsoft platform offers an excellent toolset for SOA. We use it every day on projects," says Tyson Hartman, Avanade's CTO for the Americas.
In particular, the firm relies on its Avanade Connected Architecture for .Net (ACA.NET), which Hartman describes as a suite of architecture accelerators to help people build service-based designs. "ACA is built on Microsoft components for things like caching and logging. It is the low-level plumbing, which we extend with frameworks," he says. Accenture also makes use of ACA when it is appropriate.
By spending over $1 billion a year on SOA, IBM is making by far the biggest investment in the technology. Judging from the analyst firms, which cite IBM as the SOA leader, the big money appears to be paying off. In AMR's survey titled Service-Oriented Architectures: Survey Findings on Deployment and Plans for the Future, 37 percent of the respondents cited IBM as a leader — almost three times as many citations as earned by its closest rival.
International Data Corp. (IDC) came to a similar conclusion, citing IBM Global Services as an SOA leader based on its commitment of resources to developing skills, tools, and methodologies for SOA. Specifically, it cited IBM's Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA), which aligns an SOA to the customer's business goals and directly ties business processes to the underlying software applications that support them.
In addition to SOMA, IBM announced its SOA Foundation, a set of software and services that capitalize on IBM's existing SOA capabilities. It involves a variety of products from WebSphere, Rational, and Tivoli, along with new services, to provide ongoing support for SOA deployments. These services are being grouped under IBM's SOA Transformation Roadmap Services domain, says Liebow. To support all of this, IBM launched an SOA competency center two years ago to gather and disseminate SOA best practices.
Despite the rosy predictions of Gartner, SOA still faces serious hurdles. It is not yet clear how well it will scale when hundreds if not thousands of services are flooding the network with messages. Similarly, there are concerns about security in a dynamic SOA environment. These concerns revolve around reusing services in ways never anticipated and where managers in this era of compliance and governance need to know that the associated business rules are being enforced every time each service is called.
Finally, SOA opens up the old business process reengineering can of worms. Remember BPR? The business agility SOA enables should drive organizations to reengineer their business processes. This can be a great opportunity for consulting firms, but it easily can become a quagmire for their clients. Achieving the full benefits of SOA will not come easily. Easy or hard, SOA is shaping up as a great opportunity for consulting firms. The big players are already there, and a gold rush mentality has taken hold as everyone else races to stake their claims.
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