Next generation integration
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A new, flexible enterprise software architecture is emerging - the service-oriented architecture.
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To make an enterprise's IT infrastructure truly agile, a certain amount of plumbing is needed. But the nature of that plumbing is changing radically.
Web services, application servers and integration engines, among other fast-evolving technologies, have become the new foundations for supporting end-to-end business processes, processes that by their very nature need to call on the services of multiple business applications.
The shift is well overdue, says Dr Ian Howells, vice president of marketing in Europe, Middle East and Africa for SeeBeyond, the ebusiness integration software developer. Speaking in June at Information Age's Agile Business conference in London, Howells said the integration sector had historically under-served its customers.
"I hardly need to tell you that integration is expensive. Some 40% of [IT's] cash and 80% of [its] manpower is today spent on integrating applications. And it is a market that has been very proprietary," he says.
But a chequered past is giving way to a brighter future. There has been a "fundamental shift" in the IT industry, as proprietary, fragmented infrastructures, such as CICS, Tuxedo and Corba, begin to give way to standards-based platforms, including the Java environment J2EE. These new technologies are cheaper to install and maintain, and contain many of the building blocks needed to create an integrated, flexible system. Analysts at Giga
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This new process-centric enterprise platform architecture, being labelled widely as the service-oriented architecture (SOA), supports business processes by serving up functionality from multiple vendors' business suites, enabling the creation of composite applications that can be created and re-constituted to reflect changing business processes. And underpinning that is a base of standard application servers, web services and business process management technology.
Industry commentators are as bullish about the new trend as industry insiders. Analysts at Gartner, for example, believe the SOA will be the emerging mainstream software architecture by 2007 - ending the 40-year domination of monolithic software platforms. Moreover, Gartner says that SOA is already moving into the mainstream and is the single most important theme in modern application development.
The SOA will also finally make composite applications viable. Composite application development is nothing new, but in the past it was held back because many of the required technologies were not integrated or widely deployed. "These pre-requisites are now in place," says Dr Howells.
Installing a standards-based SOA also makes sense because it offers greater investment protection - an increasingly important factor for IT buyers worried about the financial stability of their suppliers, says Howells. "There is a danger of getting even a semi-proprietary layer from the likes of BEA or IBM. You should ask the vendor: 'How can I swap you out and plug in your competitor?' By doing so, you will get a more truthful answer about how proprietary these other solutions in the market are," Howells advises.
But above all, the SOA and composite applications will add agility, making businesses much more responsive and, ultimately, lowering their IT costs.
