Online florist Proflowers.com is a paragon of modern, agile business. It has been able to redefine the competitive environment in which it operates by slashing the time between the flowers it sells being cut and their ultimate delivery destination. Not only does that guarantee freshness, it extends the bouquet’s lifespan significantly. It also manages demand: visitors to the website are subtly guided in their choices, as marketing messages are dynamically tailored to promote products where levels of availability are high.

The innovative and adaptable infrastructure that underpins that supply chain – linking suppliers’ stocks (literally) in the field, straight through to marketing messages – is evidence that the long-promised vision of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming a reality.

Simply put, SOA represents an attempt to present an organisation’s business interactions as modular services. Web services provide the means of linking these services to form fluid applications, with services sourced internally or from customers and partners – or even discovered on the Internet.

The result is a set of services that maps onto business processes and can be readily assembled and re-assembled as these business processes change. By overcoming the inflexibility of today’s monolithic application architectures, SOA will reduce IT costs and make business much more responsive.

But there is some way to go yet. As Dave Chappell, vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic Software – which provides Proflowers with parts of its SOA infrastructure – explains, the goal is for the web retailer to be able to dynamically optimise the supply chain automatically. But for the time being, the final steps still require manual interventions.

SOA has been the ‘next big wave’ of IT for half a decade; and a straw poll of any gathering of senior IT management indicates that the vast majority are implementing an SOA strategy.

But for the moment, there are few Proflowers, few businesses that have streaked ahead of the competition by virtue of the agility they derive from a sophisticated level of SOA. And for good reason.

The waiting game

For a start, “it’s bloody hard,” says Sean Baker, chief corporate scientist at infrastructure software house Iona Technologies. The history of the IT industry is sadly littered with tails of technology ‘paradigm shifts’ that promised to radically improve business but ultimately failed. SOA is different, he argues. “The benefits are so compelling as to be irresistible,” he says.

Baker cites the example of businesses such as Credit Suisse First Boston which is already well into SOA development. The financial services giant first began improving the flexibility of its mainframe applications using an SOA in the early part of this decade, developing an ‘information bus’ that allows real-time request and reply functions between the company’s back-end mainframe applications and front-end systems. Subsequently, Credit Suisse has announced plans to continue to extend its use of SOA, bringing it to new systems. Such experiences put pay to any notion that SOA is a chimera.

And Credit Suisse is not alone: analysis from Forrester Research suggests that 40% of European financial services companies are already using SOA to some degree; by 2008 the majority report that they will have a significant SOA commitment. Currently, implementations are in pilots or in test mode, but half of the managers Forrester questioned say that they expect to eventually ‘service-enable’ most applications.

The problem with such research is SOA tends to be used as a catch-all term. In fact, says Sonic’s Chappell, it is best thought of in terms of a maturity model (see illustration), where the highest level involves the automated optimisation of business services – the goal where Proflowers will automate its recommendation services entirely. “It’s a mistake to think that’s the only goal. Businesses are gaining value as they move right the way up the model.”

On the vendor side, practically every software company – from middleware vendors to business intelligence tools makers – now espouses some form of SOA strategy. For some, such as business applications giant SAP, which set out its SOA vision early on, much of the last few years has been devoted to rebuilding its sprawling application package as a set of services. As of early 2006, it had developed 3,400 enterprise services ready for deployment. Using these pre-built services, business can quickly develop applications that match business processes.

These enterprise services have helped redefine business processes at companies such as French newspaper publisher, Le Parisien, which has been able to create a simple web-system to allow readers to place classified adverts online. “This is a prime example of how to create additional value using existing systems,” says Marin Tenk, head of technology at SAP UK.

Elsewhere, shipping company P&O is using an SOA infrastructure to improve its freight handling system, providing an online booking engine and credit card handling facilities, as well as allowing it to deliver more competitive product and pricing options.

These examples are typical of what is happening throughout the business world, says Bruce Graham, vice president of worldwide consulting at middleware supplier BEA Systems. “We are still in the early stages of deployment; there aren’t many examples of enterprise-wide SOA deployments yet. But the numbers [of those pushing ahead with deployments] are moving ahead rapidly. The power of the idea has really caught hold.”

Process improvement

For Graham there are two distinct dimensions to any SOA project: complexity and business sponsorship. Within SOA projects, business sponsorship is particularly relevant. Often they will entail modelling processes to levels that the IT department will have had little direct experience of.

For many IT departments, the first stage on the road to SOA involves projects that were low in complexity and business sponsorship; these can be short, concept-validating projects that required little investment. Gradually, projects may increase in either aspect, says Graham, but there is little evidence of companies attempting fully mature SOA projects, both high in complexity and with a high degree of business sponsorship. That is because both business and IT leaders have eschewed such high-risk ‘Big Bang’ approaches, instead aiming to reach SOA maturity through iterative developments.

However, while IT leaders have been taking the first tentative steps towards the ultimate goal of complex, mature SOA, that final stage is still daunting. But it is technology developments that promise to lessen the scale of the task, says Ken Vollmer, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Service-orientation needs to be intrinsically linked with business process optimisation, he explains. This has been the thinking behind BEA’s acquisition of business process management specialist Fuego, and why the likes of Oracle have tasked their own developers with delivering Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) orchestration engines, business activity monitoring tools and enterprise service bus capabilities.

The combination of business process management (BPM) and SOA results in “a more powerful solution than either could provide on its own”, says Vollmer. In effect, the IT department is able to respond more quickly to changing requirements, even automating responses, while business units are given more control over key processes.

But it is only recently that BPM and SOA have been linked; there remain a number of technical issues to solve (such as the ability to make automatic code changes when using modelling and process automation tools from different vendors). “We aren’t all the way there yet, but we are getting closer,” says Vollmer, “so don’t let the limitations of the current implementations stand in the way.”

Allied to these developments is the notion of combining business intelligence (BI) with SOA. In effect, process optimisation is done through the real-time analysis of performance. Along with BPM and BI, there may be other technologies, traditionally regarded as stand-alone functions that can improve service-oriented architectures, and this task is being made easier because vendors are building native SOA features into all aspects of their software.

“The real benefits of SOA come from having the team of people who have the understanding on how to deliver it. But it is being helped by advancing technology: now the majority of the infrastructure that underpins SOA all use web services standards, for example,” says Mark Quirk, head of technology for Microsoft UK’s developer and platform group.

Extra value

These advances in technology are also allied to changes in how application development is being presented. Increasingly, developers are able to show line-of-business managers graphical representations of processes, which can easily be manipulated – in effect providing several layers of abstraction between process design and the underlying code. “In effect, you are assembling code rather than writing code,” says Richard Farnworth, a solution leader at application maker Oracle. “But the result is powerful: business units are being empowered by IT.”

Providing business units with greater control over their key process has obvious benefits, such as increasing business agility, but such a cultural shift represents a massive sea-change for the IT function.

In effect, the CIO’s role becomes less bound up with technology, and more with helping the organisation get to grips with process, says Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO of data management company Software AG. “But this is a real opportunity for the CIO: in the past, the IT function has been seen as the builder of Potemkin villages – [false constructs designed to be impressive but which lack substance]. SOA actually represents the biggest nail in the coffin for hype-driven IT because what is being built is the stuff that the business wants.”

What is clear is that while the evolution of technology to support SOA is “extremely exciting”, says AMR’s Dennis Gaughan, research director at IT advisory group, AMR Research, it is the power of the technology to transform the IT function and add clear business value that makes SOA so appealing. But while the technology is attractive – as many previous IT-led projects have demonstrated – “it will be the culture, process and organisational dynamics that ultimately determine the success of SOA in most organisations.”

For Gaughan, there are clear lessons to be learned from past failures. The last major change in enterprise computing – from client-server to Internet – threw the “discipline of enterprise architecture out of the window on the promise of Internet computing”, he says. But that blunted senior executives’ appetite for grand IT ventures. But, with SOA, this time the pace may be as measured as the business benefits will be profound.

Further reading

Also from April's edition of Information Age - Cisco coverts to SOA

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