1. Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next?
Rob Hailstone Director, European Software Infrastructure Research
Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next?

2. Topics Is Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? Adoption status
Just one of several linked initiatives
Adoption status
Recent survey results
Disruption ahead?
What are the knock-on effects of SOA?

3. The problem with IT today ….
I can’t reconcile my IT costs with the business value I’m delivering
I have systems with spare capacity and systems that need more resources, but I can’t shift the work from one to another
All the information I need is here somewhere, but it’s hidden, fragmented & inconsistent
What the business sees as a minor change always turns into a significant development project
Complex requirements take so long to implement that IT gets further out of step with the business
I can’t justify the resources for running occasional compute-intensive modelling & analysis work
I spend so much effort tackling IT issues I lose focus on the business
I’m meeting all my IT SLAs, but users still complain of poor performance
The more IT resources I accumulate, the less I can do with them

4. New initiatives for new expectations of IT
Virtual Platform: Exploiting available physical resources & payment options to best serve a variable workload
Virtual
Platform/
Grid
SOA: Delivering IT functionality as reusable, interoperable, location independent services
Dynamic IT:
enabling
deployment of
concurrent
initiatives
Autonomic
Computing
Service
Oriented
Architecture
Autonomic: self-managing, self-healing, self-tuning, self-securing
Enterprise
Information
Integration
Dynamic IT: giving users all the resources they need at the time they are needed, at a cost that is related to the business value delivered
EII: Delivering meaningful information from many sources to many consumers

5. Danger of definition fixation, but:
IDC’s taxonomy definition of SOA
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a technology architecture based on disaggregation. It promotes the utilization of autonomous application and system "services" abstracted from one another, independent of implementation. Ideally, an SOA should be modular, with separate layers of functional code, data, workflow, and presentation interfaces.
Each service should be self-describing with a published interface, accessible to other elements of the system, most commonly over a network. In an SOA, services are designed to be dynamically invoked.

6. Business agility & Service Oriented Architecture
Processes Aligned with Business
Business Activities
Composite
Applications
Straight-Through
Processes
User Interface
Business Process Orchestration
Registry - Portfolio of Services
Web Services Standards
Legacy Application Portfolio
New Application Components

7. Topics Is Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? Adoption status
Just one of several linked initiatives
Adoption status
Recent survey results
Disruption ahead?
What are the knock-on effects of SOA?

8. European SOA survey, Q1 2005
At what stage of adoption is your organisation with respect to the following IT initiatives?

9. European SOA survey, Q1 2005
At what stage of adoption is your organisation with respect to Service Oriented Architecture?

10. European SOA survey, Q1 2005
At what stage of adoption is your organisation with respect to Service Oriented Architecture?

11. European SOA survey, Q1 2005
At what stage of adoption is your organisation with respect to Service Oriented Architecture?

12. UK SOA conference survey, March 2005
How important is each of these as a driver of SOA in your organisation?

13. UK SOA conference survey, March 2005
If your organisation has no plans to implement SOA, how important are the following reasons for not implementing?

14. UK SOA conference survey, March 2005
How well do you feel the concepts and potential benefits of SOA are understood within your organisation?

15. UK SOA conference survey, March 2005
How have the following challenges impacted your SOA work to-date?

16. Topics Is Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? Adoption status
Just one of several linked initiatives
Adoption status
Recent survey results
Disruption ahead?
What are the knock-on effects of SOA?

17. SOA & EII – common features
Monolithic approach unworkable
Multiple technologies exposed through standards
Equivalent architectures:
Distributed, component-based
Reuse of legacy source systems
Connector/adapter layer
Multiple composite delivery for different consumers
Reliant on metadata registry
Is a DBMS just a particular type of service?
Will SOA and EII ultimately converge?
Would a single metadata registry make sense?

18. SOA and the role of registry
SOA & EII exploit heterogeneous environments
Heterogeneous operating systems, databases, application platforms, message brokers, integration technologies, service & data owners
SOA & EII also enable & encourage change
Change assembly of services into composite applications, change of choreography of business processes, piecemeal change of the underlying services themselves
This requires a degree of control that depends on a comprehensive metadata registry
Multiple, uncoordinated registries will lead to chaos and ultimate failure
This will make the registry the central focus of SOA
But is a single registry a reasonable target?

19. Classes of metadata that need to be managed
Service metadata: UDDI & other descriptive information
Where-used and frequency of use metrics
Service performance metrics: actual experienced
Service to device mapping
User metadata: security & identity management
Security policies
Process metadata: BPEL
Rules metadata: business rules
Federated content metadata
Semantic metadata / Ontologies

20. Don’t forget – SOA is bi-directional
Not just reassembling existing assets into new composites
Also replacing old assets piecemeal when they no longer deliver business value
Question: What sort of application architecture will best suit a piecemeal replacement strategy?

21. Traditional architecture limits adaptability
Use of a common, shared database & data model
Data integrity rules implemented by database
Service components ‘joined at the hip’ through the database – compromises service autonomy
Adds unwanted complexity to piecemeal service replacement

22. Possible platform for long-term SOA benefits
Composite
Services
Low-level Services-
Embedded application & data platforms
Business
Processes
Metadata Repository
Rules Engine
A return to master list maintenance?

23. Topics Is Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? Adoption status
Just one of several linked initiatives
Adoption status
Recent survey results
Disruption ahead?
What are the knock-on effects of SOA?

24. Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next?
Rob Hailstone Director, European Software Infrastructure Research
Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next?