AnalystWatch: SOA as a Service?

By Rob Hailstone, Butler Group analyst Computer Business Online - Monday, May 12 06:44 am

While Service Oriented Architecture has always been intended as an architecture that should be appropriate for organiszations of all kinds, the reality is that deployment of SOA has been spearheaded by large enterprises.

This isnt altogether surprising. Any major shift in the deployment of IT solutions will initially attract a premium price and appeal to those organizations that have the biggest problems, the biggest incentive to do something about them, and the biggest budgets.

Now SOA is becoming more established, we should expect to see a bigger variety of organizations across the whole spectrum of company sizes investing in SOA, but in fact there are still relatively few mid-sized enterprises and very few small companies that have committed to SOA.

This is not just an issue of license costs, although these can still be a significant barrier. The fact is that SOA infrastructure is complex, and the availability of skills is likely to be a larger constraint on adoption for the smaller organization than the up-front technology cost.

Nevertheless, many mid-sized and small organizations have much to gain from SOA. They are likely to use legacy applications and have little cost-justification for replacing them, yet they need to adapt their processes and operate in a more integrated fashion if they are to remain successful. They are likely to come under pressure from the larger members of the supply chains in which they operate to formalize their business-to-business interfaces as services, and will certainly wish to benefit from the consumption of services that their business partners will make available.

A viable approach to overcoming these constraints is to use a hosted service provider to deliver the SOA capabilities. This is actually an inversion of the original expectations of the role that SOA would play in the Software-as-a-Service model. The initial thoughts were that some organizations would wish to keep the SOA infrastructure in-house, since this is where the dynamic aspects of process change and composite applications are implemented. This initial model then used the abstraction of SOA to selectively use hosted services to provide the underlying functionality.

The approach that seems to be more accessible to many organizations is quite the reverse. They already have the skills to maintain their legacy applications, so it makes more sense to retain those in-house but to use a hosted SOA infrastructure.

The missing link is to acquire or create adapters that expose the functionality of the legacy applications as services. Depending on the vintage of the applications this might be simple or could be a significant challenge. However, in the great majority of cases it can be addressed cost-effectively, with screen-scraping technology providing the lowest common denominator for applications that are particularly difficult to access in this way.

This model, then, calls for the Enterprise Service Bus to be implemented at a hosted service provider. Logically, the routine monitoring of the health of the environment can be performed by the service provider, and the economy of scale will allow for the deployment of runtime governance technology to provide Service Level Agreement alerts, enforce security and compliance policies, and provide performance analysis for planning further deployments.

It leaves the door open for the service provider to define and manage processes on behalf of the customer, or for the customer to manage these remotely.

There are already a number of advocates of this deployment model for SOA. Following the acquisition of SOA infrastructure vendor Cape Clear by Workday, Workday has announced the availability of its Integration On Demand service. Workday was already an established SaaS provider of human resources, financial management, resource management, and revenue management applications, each built on the Cape Clear ESB exposing the functionality as web services.

The new Integration On Demand capability simplifies the issue of customers needing to integrate these web services with in-house applications or with applications hosted by other service providers. Based on the Cape Clear ESB, which already possessed strong connectivity features, this is a logical extension of the SaaS model for Workday.

More recently, Intalio, an established provider of open source solutions for BPM, has announced its own Intalio|On Demand SaaS delivery of its BPM technology. There is a single subscription fee per dedicated server that includes connectors for Salesforce.com and other mainstream application suites as well as support and maintenance. Intalio actually deploys this solution on top of Amazon Web Services cloud computing, decoupled by the rPath software appliance, so that there are actually several layers of virtualization operating here.

In addition to this type of vendor initiative, we have also seen instances of IT service providers implementing their own SOA-as-a service capability. One example of this is Inter Access, a Netherlands-based service provider that, as just one of its solution offerings, has created a hosted SOA infrastructure based on Oracles SOA software, with a specific repeatable solution aimed at small local government organizations.

Inter Access has also established a significant level of SOA governance expertise, particularly in the aspect of planning and scoping early projects to deliver cost-effective results.

While SOA infrastructure technology is bound to mature further and to become simpler to implement, it is probably unrealistic to expect these products to be within the capability of small organizations to deploy and manage for long-term success. We should therefore expect the SaaS deployment of the SOA platform to become more widely adopted, and several new business models to appear based on this capability.

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