Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next? Rob Hailstone Director, European Software Infrastructure Research rhailstone@idc.com Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next?

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?

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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

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?

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?

Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next? Rob Hailstone Director, European Software Infrastructure Research rhailstone@idc.com Service Oriented Architecture Inevitable? What next?