1 | P a g e S t r i n g i n g t h e Q u a r t e t – S O A , B I , B P M & t h e C l o u d

This whitepaper describes the power of leveraging together four related assets used by IT to deliver business needs. A brief introduction is provided of each, however the focus of the content is to support an architecture where SOA, the Cloud, Business Process management together with Business Intelligence emerge as the pillars of the model.

The target audience of this publication is the Business User who is becoming increasingly tech savvy. Or the Technical architect who is happily becoming increasingly aware of the business relevance of his creation.

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1 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 3

2. Cloud Computing – A Primer ..................................................................................................................... 5

3. Service Oriented Architecture – A Primer ................................................................................................ 7

4. To SOA or Not to SOA................................................................................................................................. 8

5. Business Process Management – A Primer ............................................................................................ 10

6. Business Intelligence – A Primer ............................................................................................................. 11

7. What happens when the Quartet plays together .................................................................................. 12

8. Stringing the Quartet – A use case walk-through .................................................................................. 13

9. Concluding thoughts and The Beginning ................................................................................................ 19

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1. Introduction

The Cloud, SOA, BPM and BI - While there is much written individually about these four hot topics of the day, there is perhaps less published as to the roles each play with respect to the other. While each of the four can play a significant role in improving the service capability and reach of a business, with possible reduction in costs and time to market, working together, the impact is vastly compounded.

The Cloud provides assets. It impacts business in two ways: it offers more to all and thereby reduces the value of proprietary assets. It is perhaps the second aspect that is understated but has had a greater impact on systematically eroding the bottom lines of organizations which have come to rely on their leading edge products or services around these products. Market share resulting from decades of huge investments to facilitate development, implementation and innovation is now being challenged by upstarts, because never before has so much been spent by many towards making more available for consumption in small parts, at will, without restrictive commitment. The term “barrier of entry” may well become passé. What started as simply providing excess hardware to others on demand, either by renting out tin or idle processors, has now extended to a ‘pay as you consume’ model that now spans virtually every component of the value stream. Platforms, software and even people are available on demand and increasingly, worryingly native. Worrying to those who depend on a traditional asset base of connections, tin, brick and mortar to protect them.

Service Oriented Architecture, SOA, is constructed on the principle of ‘ease’. The whole idea is to make it easy to invoke technical assets. Functional code is constructed knowing that it will be used, changed, reused and made available to many in a simple, standardized manner. Where possible, the intent is to model a ‘plug and play’ environment. The assets themselves may lie inside the enterprise or outside in the cloud. SOA represents a means to assemble them at will, put together components in different combinations and processes as meets the business need. The principal benefit of SOA is perhaps just this, the ability to change the offering fairly quickly, and thereby demonstrate a shorter time to market. It is important to recognize that cost savings by itself may not make the business case, especially in the short term. However it is becoming evident that SOA, at least in part, may be necessary to meet competitive pressure and stay in business.

Business process management (BPM) nowadays enjoys an environment where it becomes an enriched conductor of action and sequence, choosing from a wider array of choices that are made available from the Cloud through the use of SOA centric services.

Business Intelligence, BI, is the trigger that sets the symphony moving. While the others can be considered as the means, BI, through the automated interpretation of data acts in real time and starts the music without human intervention.

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The Cloud

BAM

Loosely coupled logic as services Change-friendly processes Re-exposes existing assets

SOA Enables Real-time BI Business Insight as it happens Rapid decision making capability

BI and BPM

End-User Experience

Innovative product offerings that are ahead of the competition Customized offers created by analyzing user patterns in real time Seamless user experience across different mediums – PC & Mobile devices

With SOA, BPM, BI and Cloud, Enterprises can offer their customers…

Existing IT Assets and Apps

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2. Cloud Computing – A Primer

This section aims to provide a quick primer to Cloud computing in-terms of the technical assets

provided. Forrester defines cloud computing as “A pool of abstracted, highly scalable, and managed

compute infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption.”

In simple terms, Cloud offers:

Pay per use for computation power (CPU, Storage, Network)

Virtually infinite computation resources Automatic scalability on spikes

A Cloud typically offers three models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

PaaS – Platform as a Service SaaS – Software as a Service

A fourth model has been around longer, ‘People as a Service’. What is commonly called outsourcing, of

which off-shoring has now become a billion dollar industry. While this started with technical services to

design, develop and run company-owned technology stacks, today SLA based models offer managed services which can literally do away with almost all requirements which can fall within the scope of

documentation and definition.

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Figure 1 – Cloud Business Models

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service is a business model where the Cloud provider offers online purchasing

of raw computation power in terms of CPU, Storage and Network. Customers are given access to a pre-installed ‘base virtual server’ with a selection of common Operating Systems (Linux, Windows, Solaris).

This model is ideal for customers to deploy existing applications on the Cloud. Popular vendors who

offer IaaS are Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

PaaS – Platform as a Service is a business model that builds on top of IaaS. A pre-configured application

runtime environment is provided off-the-web. Customers need to worry only about the business logic and data model of the application while the underlying infrastructure (CPU, databases, etc) and

common architectural elements of clustering, load balancing, deployment, etc is fully abstracted

Virtualized CPUs and Storage

Physical Servers across the Globe

Software Platform

The Cloud Platform

SaaS

PaaS

IaaS

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(hidden) from the user. This model is ideal for customers to deploy new applications on the Cloud.

Popular PaaS vendors are Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Force.com and RackSpace Cloud.

SaaS – Software as a Service is a business model that is based on the concept of hosted online

applications. Naturally, they are hosted on the Cloud to leverage the benefits offered by the Cloud platform. This is the ultimate way of optimizing time to market as software is almost ready to use as it

requires only minor customizations. Popular SaaS vendors are SalesForce.com, Google Apps, Microsoft

Live, etc

People as a service – Traditionally doers have been available on a ‘pay as you consume’ model.

Consultants were rarely doers and their influence did not extend from the board room to the factory floor. Foremen were foremen and strategists were strategists. Today, innovation must happen at the

level closest to the consumer, and the backbone simply an extended means to transmit information and

process across the organization so nothing has to be rediscovered, at least more than twice. As opposed to the straight rigid notion of a backbone we are seeing an octopus like structure, armed with highly

sensitive tentacles that reach into all domains, sensing and reaching into small and large opportunities

across the oceans.

3. Service Oriented Architecture – A Primer

The key goal of Service Oriented Architecture is to offer ‘Business Agility’ - the ability for businesses to

respond to change quickly, in an agile manner. SOA is a methodology of grouping resources, where each

resource/entity performs a well-defined function. The entities interact with each other to reuse functionality. In order to facilitate this interaction, a resource should be made available to others in the

network as an independent service, accessible in a standardized way. The services need to have a well-

defined governance strategy in order for them to be useful.

SOA has many predecessors and all of these architectural predecessors were stepping stones towards

the goal of achieving flexibility and loose coupling amongst components. The concept of SOA is based on evolution from component based distributed architecture and integration paradigms.

The following timeline graph of technologies denotes the evolutionary process culminating into a Service Oriented Architecture.

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4. To SOA or Not to SOA

SOA has a place but does not necessarily always reflect the best way of achieving a business objective. Let’s examine the benefits that SOA brings and the associated challenges it could create.

For SOA

The benefits of SOA are realized by the Business and by IT. Values assigned could be different. In some cases, happily, both values merge.

Business Values

People o Integration of the business and IT teams through a common language – ‘services’

o Provide the business community the ability to compose new business processes or make

changes to existing processes through a set of business services

o Provide the UI layer with reusable UI services that are agnostic to the backend

technologies

Process o Mandates the documentation of business processes thereby reducing personnel

dependency, a quicker ramp-up time when on-boarding new resources and help in

identifying a common set of services when these processes are further broken down o Ability to view the SLAs and system performance in correlation to the Business Processes

instead of mere technical data which might not be useful to the Business team

Information

o Data can be aggregated from multiple sources with ease and presented to the end users

through different channels – desktop applications, web clients or handheld devices

Time to Market o The ability to react rapidly to changing business requirements or implementations that

warrant adherence to strict deadlines as imposed by statutory requirements

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o With service reuse and loosely coupled independent services, the delivery lifecycle can be

reduced to accommodate multiple change requests Cost Optimization

o With the reuse of IT investment, the cost to deliver new services which can reuse existing

services will reduce significantly.

Agility - Built for change

o Helps applications evolve over time and last through time

o Abstract the backend and replace over time o Access to the business value, no matter what technology delivers it

o Incremental implementation approach is supported

IT Values

Connectivity o Seamless integration among components and services owing to the standardization of the

interfaces and protocols

Reuse o Reuse the available components, be it the IT infrastructure or the IT services

Ease of development and maintenance

o Since SOA deals in the creation of fairly separate modular units of logic that are self

sufficient, development can be conducted separately. Maintenance is also made easier

since parts can be serviced and removed from the operation if necessary without bringing

down the whole. The end architecture for SOA combines the two perspectives and gels it into an efficient and effective business centric IT methodology.

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Against SOA

As seen in the ‘For SOA’ section, SOA defines an architectural paradigm that requires loose coupling between systems so that composite applications can be built by re-arranging services accordingly. A large SOA implementation would typically involve multiple integration points to other systems. These integration points introduce latency depending on the quality of network. Such latency could be unacceptable in the following scenarios.

Systems involving extreme real-time response times, such as 10 to 20 milliseconds In the telecom industry, systems which interface directly with Network Elements that operate in

call control

Applications and Systems that typically do not have access to network during its operation

(Thick-client mobile-phone applications). Mobile devices having network access do not fall in

this category

Applications that require very low memory footprint

5. Business Process Management – A Primer

Business Process Management is a wider discipline that deals with designing, modeling, executing, monitoring and optimizing business processes. A business process is a set of documented and transparent independent actions that when executed in a particular order, achieves a stated goal consistently. Business Process Management System (BPMS) represents the technology element to automate and increase the efficiency of Business Process Management. BPM and SOA work well together because SOA abstracts individual tasks and activities as services. BPM execution needs technologies to string the services together to execute the business process. This approach of managing business processes in a SOA environment is highly flexible and change-friendly, because any change in the business process could to a large extent be realized by re-arranging the service invocation steps.

BPM addresses the processes to get work done more efficiently and SOA provides a more flexible IT architecture & increased re-use of assets. BPM’s top-down approach can actually accelerate a SOA rollout by fostering better business-IT alignment. BPM also encourages an iterative approach to development & production implementation which is intrinsic to SOA. SOA helps IT define and construct software assets which can be reused by business; and BPM defines their effective consumption.

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6. Business Intelligence – A Primer

Business Intelligence is an umbrella of technologies and processes for gathering, storing and analyzing data to help organizations make better business decisions. Hence, they are also referred to as ‘Decision Support Systems’. Common functions of Business Intelligence include:

Data mining Online analytical processing

Predictive analytics

Reporting

A BI solution typically helps enterprises in the following ways and much more:

Identify market share and opportunities

Understand their profitability drivers Determine business areas of high performance

Get insight into profits

BI Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

The first generation of BI was characterized by basic querying and reporting. The level of intelligence offered by first generation BI was greatly limited. Collecting and analyzing data from different disparate sources was tedious, expensive and time consuming. The reports generated by first generation BI were not reflective of the “as-is” state of the data.

The current BI solution uses a data warehouse as a centralized, combined storage by combining data from multiple and varied sources. Before loading data into the data warehouse, inconsistencies are addressed using ETL – Extract, Transform and Load, which introduces an element of latency.

The BI solution of tomorrow, powered by SOA and Cloud is designed to react and respond instantly to high-volume, high-speed data for competitive advantage, to minimize risks, and avert disasters. This is combined with Complex Event Processing, which makes it possible to identify complex patterns out of business events.

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7. What happens when the Quartet plays together

Cost-efficient, real-time decision making capabilities are realized

Ability to create Composite business applications by leveraging the power of ‘mix and match’

Allows businesses to create Enterprise Mashups by easily combining loosely-coupled IT assets

Possibility of Business Process Orchestration to combine in-house assets and assets on the Cloud

Address unpredictable spikes in load with the power of “elastic” computing resources offered by the Cloud

Service enabling Business Intelligence increases the value of BI investments and greatly

increases the possibility of automated intelligent applications Proactive business performance management (Business KPIs, etc) and correct problems as they

occur

The diagram shown above outlines one of the many ways by which SOA, BPM, BI and the Cloud work together. From a business perspective, Business Intelligence triggers a change in business process. Business Processes involve stringing together service assets and Cloud assets (services and applications). Cloud is the common fabric that ties all the three together by providing a scalable, dynamic infrastructure.

BPM invokes services

SOA Assets

BPM

BI

Reports

Reports

Reports

Business Intelligence triggers Process Change

Cloud Infrastructure powers BI, BPM and SOA

Cloud Assets

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8. Stringing the Quartet – A use case walk-through

This use-case addresses the Telecom Mobile services industry. It is fairly simple to visualize and draw parallels in other industries as well. This use-case describes how an intelligent, value-added services engine leverages the power of SOA, BI, BPM and the Cloud.

The mobile service provider – ‘Kotuku mobile’ is under pressure from competition to offer innovative value added services. Convergence and brand exploitation has led to diversified business models in their industry. The consumption of voice, data and other services has dramatically increased due to the rapid growth of smart phones, tablet computers and other handheld devices in their markets. These factors are forcing Kotuku mobile to quickly launch intelligent value-added service facilities that combine SOA, BI, BPM and the Cloud so as to maintain a competitive advantage and customer loyalty.

Before doing a deep-dive into the use-case, the diagram shown below represents the topology of the current IT landscape of Kotuku mobile. They already use SOA, BI, BPM and the Cloud, individually. Hence, it is first important to visualize the landscape, before seeing how these methodologies string together.

In the IT landscape shown in the diagram above, Kotuku mobile has deployed some of the business processes and data-oriented services on an external third-party hosted Cloud platform. The in-house,

BPM

Existing Legacy Systems and Monolithic Applications / Assets

SOA Platform

BPM

Cloud Platform

BI Platform

ETL

Data warehouse

Data-oriented services on the Cloud

Data Analytics & Reporting

In-house systems

Business Processes on the Cloud

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shared SOA platform has a Business Process runtime and a service layer. The Business Intelligence platform comprises of traditional ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), Analytics and Reporting. The in-house SOA platform uses adapters to re-use legacy assets and other applications. The types of assets deployed on each layer are:

SOA Assets:

Loosely coupled logic as services

Good mix of atomic and composite services

Includes services that depend on legacy systems Includes independent data-oriented services

BPM Assets:

Set of core Business Processes

BI Assets:

Enterprise Data Warehouse

ETL Reporting – Canned Reports

Analytics and Decision tools

Cloud Assets:

External IaaS, PaaS or SaaS subscriptions

In-house virtualized infrastructure

Now, we are ready to examine the use case of “intelligent value-added service” that would leverage existing assets as described above by stringing the quartet – SOA, BI, BPM and the Cloud. The goal of this “intelligent value added service” is to automatically analyze consumer usage patterns of core mobile services (Voice, SMS, Data etc.), and propose a customized value added package tailored to the user’s exact needs. Examples of customized value added packages offered by Kotuku mobile would be –

A bundle of 1000 free SMSs

Free data at night,

Weekend free calls etc.

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When the customer logs into Kotuku mobile’s portal, the system dynamically offers value added services for purchase. Since the proposed offer is directly related to the user’s actual usage pattern, the probability of a purchase would be high. When the user accepts the offer /makes a purchase, the system instantaneously provisions the value-added service.

Here is the contribution of each member of the Quartet:

Business Intelligence

Capability to retrieve past usage - based on voice, data, etc

Capability to retrieve customer purchase history

Business Processes

Process to identify user patterns and create recommendation

Process to provision and activate the value added service

Services

Query Usage – getVoiceUsage, getDataUsage, getSMSUsage

VAS Manager – addPackages, updatePackages, listPackages

Tariff Manager – updateTariff, createTariff, deleteTariff User Profile – getAllUsers, get|set|update SuggestedVAS

Billing System Manager - addBillableVAS

Network Activation Manager – activateVAS, deactivateVAS

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The business Process to identify usage pattern and to derive the recommendation, is shown in this diagram. This process runs as a background job and gets triggered by the business process container at configurable intervals. The services shown in this use-case are well defined in-terms of granularity and abstraction. The functions of service operations are fairly self-explanatory by their name. The next level of detail in terms of how the service is realized is not relevant in this context. However, it is important to know that BI and SOA are already stringed by exposing BI capabilities as services. The complete stringing sequence is shown in this business process flow diagram below:

add Billable VAS

BPM

Existing Legacy Systems and Monolithic Applications / Assets

SOA Platform

BPM

Cloud Platform

BI Platform

ETL

Data warehouse

Data-oriented services on the Cloud

Data Analytics & Reporting

In-house systems

Business Processes on the Cloud

getVoiceUsage getDataUsage

add | update | list Packages

update | create | delete Tariff

set | get | update Suggested VAS

activate | deactivate VAS

Provision and Activate VAS Process

Usage Pattern Analyzer Process

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Business Process Flow for analyzing and identifying value-added services

The second business process in this use-case deals with provisioning and activating the value added services that were identified by the previous business process. This process is triggered by the customer when he logs into the Kotuku mobile portal and accepts / purchases the proposed offer. The business process strings the services ‘addBillableVAS’ and ‘activateVAS’ to add the value-added-service to the billing system and instantly activate it on the mobile network.

Service asset on Cloud

BI asset in-house

getAllUsers

getVoiceUsage

getDataUsage

getSMSUsage

listPackages

setSuggestedVAS

Usage Pattern Process on Cloud

For each user

If Usage > Configured Limits

AND Package not already provisioned

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Business Process Flow for provisioning and activating value-added services

These two processes demonstrate the benefits of 'Stringing the quartet' as follows:

In the 'Usage Analyser' process, it was easier to get business insights on the customer's usage patterns due to service-enablement of BI, combined with invocation of assets on the Cloud. The focus of the 'Provisioning and Activation' process was to capitalize on invocation of services on the Cloud and service-enablement of the core Telecom Network layer (in-house assets) to instantly provision the value-added services. Stringing SOA, BI, BPM and Cloud made it quick and easy for Kotuku mobile to deploy two BPM processes instantaneously, to deliver the intelligent value-added services.

Service asset on Cloud

Service asset in-house

BI asset in-house

getSuggestedVAS

updateTariff

updatePackages

For each VAS

Provisioning and Activating Process on Internal Env

addBillableVAS

activateVAS

getVoiceUsage

getDataUsage

getSMSUsage

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9. Concluding thoughts and The Beginning

There have been certain trends that consistently emerge, irrespective of industry, as durable, fostering allegiance amidst users and producing wealth for those who incorporate them in their offerings. Amongst them, the principle of self-service, transferring power to the user, is perhaps significant. Countless examples of incredible commercial success resulting from followers across varied cultural domains prevail, Facebook, Google, Twitter are examples.

Why? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that they appeal to the age old values of liberty and freedom of expression, home building, ownership of domain and design to satisfy individual desire. The opportunity to provide a structured blank canvass, to build, enrich and provide restricted entry, was realized by Facebook and the value was created by the users themselves. This kind of self governance, that panders to the desire for independence and control, yet with belonging in a greater community, is critical towards widespread acceptance. The quartet plays music of this genre. The choice of content is determined by the user, the options unlimited by the Cloud, and incredibly a means to generate instant gratification without deliberate action, but simply by setting data triggers.

It may be the beginning of a whole new era.

About Torry Harris Business Solutions

Torry Harris Business Solutions (THBS) was founded in 1998 in New Jersey, USA. The company focuses on high-end, niche technical skills, predominantly in the middleware, integration, Service-oriented Architecture and Cloud Integration areas. It provides software services to enterprise clients across different industry verticals through a combination of offshore and onsite services. The company has offshore development centers in Bangalore (India) and Shenzhen (China) and offices in Bristol (UK), Ireland, Munich, Madrid, Singapore, Dubai and Shenzhen.

The company has been CMMi Level 3 certified; for quality and maturity of processes. It has also been certified to comply with British Security Standards 7799 (now termed as IS 27001).

For more information about the company, please visit www.thbs.com