SOA and Cloud Computing

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In the first part of the SOA motivation factors, we discussed how Agility can bring effectively increase an organization's profit and savings. In this article let us see how SOA will do the savings for an organization.

Motivation factors for Using SOA - Cost Saving

Earlier on this blog, we discussed the key concepts of the SOA as Services, interoperability and loose coupling. These are the factors that do the cost saving and a motivation factor for using SOA in an organization. These cost cuttings/savings will be at both Business level and IT infrastructure and maintenance level. At business level the cost savings will come from the Agility.

Many times even though a product is cheaper we will go for it as it was difficult to integrate into our existing system. SOA solves this problem since it is loosely coupled and interoperability. This it allows you to choose the cheapest product that can offer the same kind of functionality and stability.

Then as we have seen the Agility of the SOA will make you streamline the Business process. Which means, now your business process support ever changing market and demand. Also one of the key SOA concepts Service, will enable you to reuse any component with in your SOA setup. Together these enables an organizations to use its internal resources more effectively. Hence the cost requited to adopt to a new change or rapid change in the business are less compared to the traditional approach.

Another factor that helps organizations while using SOA is, Reporting. Using this reporting you can the dynamic reports from any where in you SOA setup. Say for example, we are monitoring a business process and getting the reports on a daily basis from this SOA reporting functionality, If there any is any change is required to improve the business functionality of that business process.. we can take decision after seeing the daily reports. Thus you don’t need to wait for your quarterly results and annual sheets to check how well your business process is performing.

In summery: due to improved business Agility, it is possible to improve the revenue by adopting quickly to new business models and by offering innovative/timely products for the end user.

The above are only some of the ways of how SOA can reduce the costs with in my understanding as an IT engineer. From a core business view, you may found more ways to reduce the cost after implementing SOA. If you have a new point to add to this..please leave in comments section of this post.

Its not just the cost savings from Business level but SOA can also reduce the costs at IT infrastructure level.

One of the biggest problems with the large IT projects is the cost required to build and maintain them. SOA''s concept of service means you can reuse it and can call it from anywhere and use it. This is one of the key factor in reducing the cost of getting a IT project up and running. For example, when you want to build a new application which needs a functionality that is already existing in your IT environment, you can use it again by exposing it as a service.

Another concept of SOA is interoperability, which makes the integration easy. This means the cost required to integrate a new product or existing legacy applications is less. As a whole, a new business process can be developed easily or the existing can be modified easily with out putting more money and efforts on to how they will be implemented.

By isolating the implementation aspects from the services, SOA enables the usage of existing legacy systems. By enabling a pool of shared services, SOA enables reuse of them at various levels. This eliminates the re-occurring costs in IT systems management. It also reduces the duplication of code, applications, storage for the same functionality and hence reduces the maintenance cost.

Summery:

• Reduces Total cost of Ownership[TCO] and increase Return Of Investment [ROI] on evolving systems.
• Add value to core investments by leveraging existing legacy assets/systems into SOA.
• New systems can be built faster for less money because existing services can be more easily reused.
• Built for flexibility hence enables plugging new services when required, which reduces the time to deliver the new functionality.
• Long term value of interoperability, your SOA infrastructure will be ready for future.

Agility, on an organizational level, refers to efficiency with which an organization can respond to change. Increasing organizational agility is very attractive to corporations, especially those in the private sector. Being able to more quickly adapt to industry changes and outmaneuver competitors has tremendous strategic significance.

Before understanding how SOA can bring the agility to your organization, you need to get an idea of where the present complexity is and how it is effecting the agility in your organization. Some of the factors that effects agility are:

1. Technology :

We generally spend months and years to get our IT systems stabilized. We bring in a lot of software and different versions of them into out network. Sometimes for every new functionality we need, we may have to get a new software product. In the end we may face a situation where in it is difficult to find the skilled people to work on those systems. Hence the technology we use to implement our business is complex.

2. Business Process:

If you have a complex business system, obviously the implementation is complex. Many times we realize this complexity only when we started to implement it. Business functionality also contains conflicting elements due to different perspectives or applications.

3. Integration

We tend to use and combine functionality from existing systems/applications. Even if our individual systems/applications are working good, when we integrate them is a complex work and surely we get many issues.

4. Maintenance

After we go past the technology. business and integration complexities, we need a way to manage this complex environment. Updating the components we used to implement out business logic and adding new functionality is always a tedious task.

SOA can help addressing all these issues of complexity. SOA is more agile in order to react as quickly as possible to changing business environments and offer new services to customers, suppliers and partners.

• SOA can be understood without any knowledge technology used to implement it.
• SOA decomposes large systems into services and application frontends.
• The granularity of the service is well suited to gain a high level understanding of the entire system.
• SOA encourages the reuse which streamlines the code and reduce redundancies.
• in SOA every service is documented, which add the comprehensibility of SOA

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This is the basic SOA certification from IBM. It was introduced in 2008 and test code is 000-669.

Must read:This is not a kind of certification which you can just read and write. The main objective of this test is to test how much of understanding you have on SOA and its importance to business. your practical experience matters a lot.
Also, you need to have solid understanding of Enterprise Application integration (EAI), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) key concepts and how they are implemented.

• Test Code: 000-669
• Number of questions: 54
• Time allowed in minutes: 90
• Required passing score: 67%
  

1. Identify business functions where SOA can improve competitiveness and productivity.
2. Identify how SOA can provide return on investment (ROI) (improve competitiveness, reduce costs, increase responsiveness.)
3. Identify the SOA features that make businesses more agile.
4. Identify the opportunity costs of not adopting SOA.
5. Identify situations where SOA does not provide the desired value or is not appropriate.
6. Identify the business drivers for SOA.

1. Define the concept of a service in SOA.
2. Describe the architectural concepts used in SOA (for example: loose coupling and separation of concerns.)
3. Describe the roles that XML plays in SOA.
4. Describe the role of a service registry and/or repository in SOA.
5. Explain what a business process is in the context of SOA (including business process management and automation) and how it facilitates business flexibility.
6. Determine the role that technology standards (SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, BPEL, WS-I, ) play in SOA.
7. Describe the role that Web 2.0 and its related technologies play in SOA (for example: REST and AJAX.)
8. Describe the importance of goals, KPIs, and measurement to business success with SOA.

1. Describe the characteristics of a basic SOA architecture.
2. Describe the elements of the IBM SOA Reference Architecture, and their roles and relationships.
3. Describe the enterprise service bus (ESB) and its role in SOA.
4. Describe the role of Web services and messaging in building an SOA.
5. Describe orchestration of business processes using services and human interactions.
6. Describe the stages of the SOA lifecycle (model, assemble, deploy, manage.)

1. Explain the need for SOA governance.
2. Describe SOA governance and related concepts (roles and responsibilities, funding models, policies, enforcement, critical success factors, and metrics.)
3. Describe Quality of Service (QoS) issues pertinent to SOA.
4. Explain the need for a distributed security model (including issues like identify provisioning and propagation.)
5. Identify the impact of changes to services in the SOA lifecycle (change management, versioning, and service lifecycle.)
6. Identify the role of an enterprise service bus (ESB) in SOA management and governance.
7. Identify service management issues.

1. Describe the elements of SOA governance that need to be addressed during the preparation for SOA.
2. Understand the importance of documenting business issues, drivers and goals when preparing for SOA.
3. Capture and assess IT issues, drivers, and goals (including metrics and KPIs.)
4. Describe the people, organizational, and technology factors that impact readiness for SOA and its success.
5. Describe the steps for SOA adoption (including adoption roadmaps and maturity assessments.)
6. Identify barriers to SOA adoption.
7. Describe points of entry into SOA.
8. Describe the importance of securing executive sponsorship and solving funding issues for SOA adoption.

Must read:

1. IBM SOA white paper
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-whitepaper/
2. SOA terminology
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-term1/
3. ESB
 http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-esbpat2/
4. Service Repositories in SOA
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-servrepos/
5. SOA for Dummies book
6. BPM Concepts
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-bpm1/
7. SOA in action
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-in-action/

Recommended Reading:

1. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-govframe/
2. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/newto/index.html
3.http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0801_olson/0801_olson.html
4.http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0806_radcliffe/0806_radcliffe.html
5. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-practical/
6. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-govern/
7. http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/WebServices/soa2/