SOA: Socially Oriented Architecture - Technical Opportunies ...

Technical Opportunities, Social Challenges

SOA: Socially Oriented Architecture

Hub Vandervoort Chief Technology Officer Progress Software

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If YOu IgnOred SOA, WhAT WOuld YOu MISS?Answer: The opportunity to participate in a much larger and more dynamic social community. If you’re surprised by this answer, it’s because SOA’s uniqueness goes beyond any new technologies. Traditional “latest and greatest” technologies and architectures—such as mainframes, client-server, and even Web applications—interact point to point with one party. SOA creates multi-party interactions. Communities of more-or-less independent service owners collaborate dynamically to deliver a richer customer experience in response to the immediate context. Why does this matter? Business success now and, increasingly, in the future will result from the ability to participate in these new, more dynamic, federated communities.

This social orientation is driving both new SOA technology needs and management changes in how technology is delivered and governed—in ways that may not be immediately apparent.

get socially architected. Join Progress CTO Hub Vandervoort for a discussion about your options.

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Technical OppOrTuniTies, sOcial challengesConventional wisdom has focused on the opportunities of SOA: seamless integration, business agility, and service reuse. But there are challenges to realizing these opportunities.

If you knock down silos and open up system borders for >seamless integration, you create security vulnerabilities. Who will come in? Who can access what information?

> Business agility allows you to capitalize on market opportunities. But how do you manage the changes, and who has control? You need governance.

Deciding what to > reuse (and not to reuse)—and when, how, and by whom—raises issues of ownership, sovereignty, and control. sOa opportunities are about technology, but sOa challenges are about people.

So you need a socially oriented architecture—a way to get people to work together—to seize the opportunities of service-oriented architecture.

Challenges

Security

Governance

Ownership

Socially orientedArchitecture

Opportunity

Integration

Agility

Reuse

Service-oriented Architecture


SOA CrITICAl SuCCeSS fACTOrS: AT A glAnCeIf you get the technology right and manage it correctly, people will be able to work together. Interestingly, the critical technology for supporting social and service interaction are the same. You must:

> Connect interactions freely. The best relationships are built on free, easy interaction. The foundation of a successful service-oriented architecture is seamless interoperability.

> Mediate policy actively. Strong, trusting personal and business relationships are based, respectively, on informal or formal contracts with unwritten principles or policies about respecting security and sovereignty and promises to interact in a certain way. In the best relationships, when differences about rules occur, either party can raise and mediate the issue directly.

> Control semantics precisely. Whether people or systems communicate freely, they need to make sure meaning is clear. They need a common understanding.

If you get these three things right, you will have both a seamless, responsive technical experience and a protected, regulated community.

Some examples of SOA in action can shed more light on the technology success factors and new management practices needed for SOA success.

“If you get the technology right and manage it correctly, people will be able to work together.”


SOA In ACTIOn: All under One rOOfFor some time now, customers of a major US bank have been seeing an “Add Accounts” choice on the “My Portfolio” page of the bank’s Web site. Clicking here reveals a list of two hundred-plus independent credit card, mortgage, insurance, investment, and even airline companies. Bank customers who also have accounts with any of these companies can bring information (even frequent flyer miles) from those accounts into their personal portfolio page of core banking information. It’s all under one roof.

What’s more, if they visit the Web sites of the companies on the list, they can find the same capability. In short, a federation of separate companies now makes it possible to seamlessly integrate all of an individual’s account information in a number of different contexts.

The result is a rich customer experience and a competitive differentiator for the federated companies.

Watch IT executives tell their stories of SOA in action. >


SOA In ACTIOn: BATTerIeS InCluded How many times have you purchased a toy or some gadget, started to assemble it, and discovered you need to go out and get some batteries to finish the job? People working in an ERP, lending, or other application have this kind of disjointed experience every time they need to get a business credit report to complete their application. They must leave their current application, go to the site of the leading US credit report provider, and then re-key the credit information into their current application. Luckily, the credit report company saw an opportunity to provide the right information in the right place—and to grow its business. The company created a set of Web service APIs for licensing to the providers of applications that require business credit information. Software providers can embed these APIs in their applications, giving their customers credit information when and where they need it, within the application they are working on.


SOA In ACTIOn: The genIe In The BOTTleOnline airline aggregators typically offer ticketing for virtually all the airlines plus reservations for a number of hotels, car rentals, etc. But one leading aggregator’s site is building a new SOA community—with affinity sites—to expand its business. For example, a participating golfing site could have links to vacation bundles for golfing in Bermuda; a jazz site links to travel packages to the Newport Festival; and a wine site links to trips to the Sonoma and Napa Valleys. For visitors to these sites, the SOA community is the genie in the bottle that can make it all happen. These links will lead to the aggregator’s site, from which various reservations can be made via additional links to the sites of airlines, hotels, car rental agencies, etc.


SOA In ACTIOn: JuST In TIMeA SOA can consist of in-house service owners as well: the subsidiaries of an enterprise, the divisions of a subsidiary, the departments of a division, and even the locations of a distributed department, and so forth. In fact, a major aircraft manufacturer of a revolutionary airplane design has taken the idea of a SOA community to a new, innovative level in revolutionizing its manufacturing approach as well.

The company has created a supply chain SOA that includes each of its internal work cells as an independent, federated service owner as well as external partners. The goal is to be able to in-source or outsource at any level, on the fly.

The company is taking just-in-time manufacturing to the next level, providing flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, and eliminating some layers of bureaucracy for the individual units.


A SeAMleSS end uSer experIenCeWhat do these examples have in common? They deliver a seamless, broader experience for end users, aligned with their context. In other words, SOA is about relationships, not technology. End users don’t care how services are delivered. End users do care about what happens online. Once they have experienced SOA, they come to expect—and trust—appropriate online services to be there reliably and to adapt to them continuously with richer experiences.

As a result, there needs to be a change in the way IT is developed and managed.

“SOA is about relationships.”


The reSulTIng MAnAgeMenT IMperATIveSOA success will occur when IT organizations deliver adaptive, ever broadening SOA experiences that SOA users will come to expect. That means that IT organizations should…

> Stop thinking about delivering software releases on a date-driven deadline.

> Start thinking about delivering a dynamic contextual user experience as a continuous service.

Companies need to earn the customer’s business every day. Consider a leading sales automation vendor that is one of the pioneers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Rather than putting out software version releases, the company adjusts its service behavior to specific customer needs in the moment—with ongoing software improvements.


A vAlue ChAIn…WITh federATed InTerACTIOnSWhat else do all of the examples have in common? SOA communities form a value chain to differing degrees, with each member or service incrementally adding value by enriching or broadening the end user experience.

In the first example the SOA community of financial services companies, each account that integrated into the portfolio information page added value. Subsequent examples build up to a complete vertical value chain: the airline links into a travel aggregator, which, in turn, is a component of affinity sites. The value chain results in an incremental experience that gets richer and can change over time as the context changes. However, there is one constant, whether community members are various in-house teams or separate companies: their interactions are federated.

It’s important to understand what federated actions entail to see what technologies and management practices are essential for SOA success.


federATed InTerACTIOnS: An OvervIeWFederated interactions can be viewed from two dimensions: the technical characteristics of the service-oriented architecture and the communal characteristics of the socially oriented architecture.

The two align—with the technical characteristics enabling and supporting the communal dimension or social structure of the SOA, or, conversely, the federation members requiring specific kinds of technology and management practices to work together and succeed.

Communal

Socially orientedArchitecture

Technical

Service-oriented Architecture

• Heterogeneous systems

• Loosely coupled transport bindings

• Independent security domains

• Event-driven processes

• Flexible, standard semantics

• Copes with diversity

• Anticipates and desires unexpected relationships

• Preserves the sovereignty of individuals and members

• Collaborates as a “virtual” team

• New relationships based on trust and commitment

• Shares a common vocabulary


federATed InTerACTIOnS: ChArACTerISTICSTechnically, the service-oriented architecture consists of heterogeneous systems with independent security domains—because, as a social structure, an SOA includes diverse members sovereign in their own domains, including their choice of platform and security.

Technically, to integrate heterogeneous systems requires standards-based, loosely coupled transport bindings—in runtime. Hardwiring the integration in design would require re-design and new coding for every change. Loosely coupled transport bindings support openness in the socially oriented architecture, allowing it to anticipate unexpected relationships.

However, how do you get these independent domains to collaborate as a virtual team and share a common vocabulary—to optimize runtime performance while enforcing SOA-wide security? After all, this is what’s necessary for the SOA members to execute work efficiently and effectively.

get socially architected. Join Progress CTO Hub Vandervoort for a discussion about your options.

click here >


federATed InTerACTIOnS: ChArACTerISTICS (continued)Given the cross-organizational nature of the SOA, centralized, top-down command-and-control won’t work. Domains will want to control their piece of the process (or have been given this control, in the example of the airline manufacturer’s work cells).

Consequently, the socially oriented architecture needs a consensual form of governance—by contracts, with security policies and service-level agreements (SLAs). Relationships of trust will follow from observing and enforcing agreed-upon contracts.

In other words, in a SOA federation—as opposed to traditional, hierarchical or top-down IT governance—the domains maintain sovereignty over key functions, but cede some control to a centralized authority for functions that cross and mediate SOA boundaries, such as service integration, business process performance, security, and accurate data exchange.

This balance between central and local control may vary, according to SOA needs, but there must be some division of power to maintain domain sovereignty and SOA agility, on one hand, and reliable collaboration on the other.

Learn more about runtime SOA management. >


The reSulTIng MAnAgeMenT IMperATIveThe concept of federation and the characteristics of federated interactions have clear implications for a practical SOA implementation. First, SOA demands a management change.

> Stop thinking about SOA governance in the context of conventional hierarchical organizational models…

> Start erasing the traditional lines of power and authority and orient towards collaboration, establishing trust and commitment with SlAs.

Collaboration based on SLAs allows services to be in-sourced and outsourced using the same approach—as the manufacturing example shows—providing optimal agility and productivity. This approach works recursively at the work-cell level, the department level, the division level, the company level—and beyond to facilitate mergers and acquisitions, divestures, and partnerships and alliances.


frICTIOn-free SOA: CrITICAl TeChnOlOgY SuCCeSS fACTOrSSecond, federation also requires key enabling technologies: those that cross the heterogeneous system boundaries to support collaboration and SOA governance. As mentioned earlier, this SOA infrastructure must:

> Connect interactions freely. Look for a messaging and event distribution platform that is designed to cross platform, network, and organizational boundaries. This is a core competency for federation and collaboration.

> Mediate policy actively. Look for a technology that provides visibility into business performance and alerts on and enforces compliance for security policy and SLAs spanning SOA processes.

> Control semantics precisely. To mediate semantic inconsistencies, look for technology that allows you to build and manage a complex, federated, common data model—with visual tools—and facilitates deploying those semantics in a distributed, runtime environment.

These are core competencies for federation and collaboration. Look for best-of-breed products that are built from the ground up for integration and mediation among diverse computing resources.

Learn more about using a common data model to mediate semantic inconsistencies. >


WhAT dOeS ThIS MeAn TO YOu?These critical technologies and management imperatives matter because in the future…

Success will…

> depend on your ability to insert what you do into the value chain electronically to participate in a service-oriented architecture.

> result from your participation in a new, more dynamic, federated community experience—the socially oriented architecture.

The examples of pioneering SOAs show the new, unique opportunities and resulting gains that SOA makes possible. You can’t afford to ignore it or wait five years because SOA is happening—fast.


SOA TOdAY And TOMOrrOWResearch shows a doubling of SOA-based applications in the next two years.* This shift will include other architectures persisting and being incorporated into SOAs. At Progress Software alone, we have more than 350 SOA customers and more than 100 applications partners embarked on SOA-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings—with 40% saying SaaS solutions will be more than half their business by 2010.

Right now, the three critical technologies—connectivity, policy enforcement, and semantics—are available as capabilities and/or services within the SOA. The future will see integration-as-a-service infrastructure embedded in hardware or offered as managed services more, and capabilities, such as analytics, offered as a real-time service. A major telecommunications company is now manufacturing an appliance with SOA integration built in. Attached in your basement, it connects you to services provisioned from within the company’s network.

So, the future is here. If you’re not part of it, the time to get involved is now.

* Progress Actional Webinar, “Continuous Service Optimization: How to Use SOA to Better Serve Your Business Goals,” 2007.


STArT—WITh BuSIneSS ChAnge prOJeCTSThe best way to start is, in fact, with a practical approach. Begin with a business change project—in the innovative part of your business—so you can learn about SOA and mature (not with the big, core enterprise systems that maintain business continuity and stability).

The innovative areas are also better suited to applying the IT management changes necessary for successful social federation:

Continuous delivery of service experience versus date-driven functional >software releases

Collaboration with a federated community versus hierarchical, top-down >control

For successful technical federation, the critical success factors are connectivity, policies enforcement, and semantic integration. Choose best-of-breed SOA solutions built to be adaptive, rather than platform or stack products that lock you in.

With these basics in place, you can participate in the more dynamic interaction environment of a socially oriented architecture—and its growing opportunities.


Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Progress Software, has more than 20 years of experience as a consultant and senior technology executive in the networking, communications software and Internet industries.

About Progress Software Corporation

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Our goal is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership. Progress can be reached at www.progress.com or 1-781-280-4000.

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Get socially architected. Join Progress CTO Hub Vandervoort for a discussion about your options.

click here >

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