Now as we make the latest transition to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the next wave of new software methodologies like XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI implement a superior standards-based platform for enterprise architectures that utilize a common infrastructure.

The ultimate goal for SOA is to weave together a portfolio of software that runs your organization far more effectively, allowing vital new forms of collaboration with partners and accelerating the introduction of new products and services to strengthen your business.

SOA as a third wave of technology
In the 80s, manufacturing resource planning software became a billion dollar software industry with a host of new MRP software vendors. At the same time, relational databases from Ingres, IBM, Oracle, Sybase, and others hoped to act as integration hubs for all software—with everything running on the latest and greatest client/server hardware technology. With the profusion of new PC desktops, before long, a single company's IT landscape might consist of thousands of applications and an untold number of Excel spreadsheets.

In the 90s and to the present day we've seen the rise of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Information about customers, inventory, suppliers, assets, and employees was fragmented into a profusion of data “silos.” ERP software hoped to consolidate all of these applications and databases into a single software system. SAP, PeopleSoft and Infor were major players in this $25 billion software industry, joined by an army of consultants for business process re-engineering and ERP implementations.

As a third wave of change, Service Oriented Architecture holds great promise to blend the best features of the past with new Web-based innovations-- but avoid the high costs and long implementation times associated with the previous centralized approaches.

So what is SOA?
SOA is an approach to organizing IT resources in which data, logic and infrastructure resources are accessed by routing messages between networked interfaces.

SOA is not new. The concepts for SOA have been proposed in various forms before, and capture many of the best practices or actual use of the architectures that came before. SOA continues the consolidation of business processes, but separates processes, software, and data into smaller, decentralized units.. All units can be opened up “as a service” so that communication between multiple organizations and companies can occur.

This communication occurs via XML (Extensible Markup Language) which can be sent across the network with HTTP, alongside Web transfer standards such as SOAP. The major software vendors such as Microsoft and IBM agreed on the standard XML structures to transfer common data such as numbers or text. Cisco Systems, EMC, HP, IBM, and Intel are all building SOA appliances for networking and data management. Others vendors offer tools for managing SOA performance and security.

These enabling standards have the advantage of being commonly used, well-tested for security, and are vendor neutral.

SOA & Composite Applications
SOA makes it possible to build software that adds, modifies, or extends a business process-- to assemble an entirely new class of business application that combines the functionality from multiple existing systems. SOA allows you to access and reuse logic and data that already exist in a system, and to make it available to other applications through Web-based services. Alternatively, SOA can open up your system so that you can provide partner information, updates, or statistics to your partners and customers on demand.

SOA and its Web integration services enable you to assemble and maintain a set of "composite" applications, pulling together all necessary functionality from:

• Legacy applications running on your preferred platforms
• New custom-written functions specific to current and future needs
• Third-party subscription applications delivered via the Internet
• Hosted applications that reside outside your firewall
• Databases

An example of this is creating a self-service portal for your customers or business partners. A number of your existing processes already supported by IT services can be combined within the portal to provide your end-user with a one-stop access to a range of company products or services. Until SOA, this has been very expensive and difficult to deploy, requiring considerable application integration, programming and testing effort. But with an SOA, a “composite application” can be assembled easily by opening up applications regardless of the location or technology being woven together.

Importantly, this lets you tap into the exciting new online SOA services from Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo and others. Your SOA will connect you to the an array of new "online-only" SOA innovations and services from thousands of online developers and resources.

The business justifications for SOA
The business drivers for embracing an SOA include flexibility, efficiency and universality.

• Flexibility: By abstracting away from the implementation of business processes, SOA gives an organization has more freedom to choose an implementation without impacting the client application.
• Efficiency: By developing around standards and well-known techniques, your organization gets better efficiency and reuse of knowledge at the application, application infrastructure, and technical infrastructure levels.
• Universality: Introduce new capabilities into the SOA and you'll reap the benefits everywhere. This is similar to efficiency, but even better: it means the ability to leverage new and existing IT assets enterprise-wide, and also with business partners and customers. The possibilities of benefiting from SOA in more than one business unit can change the ROI dramatically.

The business case for SOA relies on the fact that it can be deployed incrementally, allowing returns on the investment to flow more quickly. As SOA becomes more widespread, business value increases rapidly:

• The cost for a managed infrastructure required can be amortized across multiple projects
• Implementation costs per project fall
• Time to market for new business initiatives is greatly reduced
• Software maintenance costs drop

Migrating to a Service-Oriented Architecture
Service-Oriented Architectures are not a passing fad. The SOA concept is a logical evolution of IT theory and concepts that have developed over time. But creating and supporting SOA services requires a wide range of experienced people who understand the various underlying systems and infrastructure, as well as the business processes behind those services. You'll need to thoroughly assess issues relating to architectures, security, governance, performance, network requirements, and change management.

i3's expert knowledge– making the best use of your application solutions and new development services –helps you navigate to the new SOA  I3 has the senior business process analysts, an experienced staff of network administrators, .NET, SQL Database, Java, and HTML programmers and creative designers to help you pull it all together to accelerate your business results. Contact us today to set up an appointment to explore your SOA future.