Enterprises increasingly deploying SOA projects

May 23, 2006

More and more today, enterprises are implementing SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects because of the greater flexibility and productivity that SOA can bring to a company.

But there are many important details that should be considered before the promise of SOA is realized. One of the most difficult challenges is incorporating legacy systems into the SOA environment without changing these existing systems.

How will IT manage the delicate balance of protecting the power of existing data and systems, while also moving the systems forward into the new world of SOA?

Data services, with the appropriate features, may serve as the answer. Data services are an essential, but often overlooked, component for delivering data--the lifeblood of any organization.

An important thing to realize is that a fully functional SOA is comprised of four main components, and no one vendor currently provides the best-of-breed technology for each of these components. The four components--(a) transaction services, (b) data services, (c) a services registry, and (d) orchestration technology--are defined below.

(a)
Transaction Services -- These are services that most often come to mind when one thinks of a Web service. Transaction services automate business processes. For example, "create order" is a common transaction service used to enter a new order into an order management system. As the order progresses through the fulfillment process, it is updated with other transaction services like "allocate inventory," "pick," "pack" and "ship." Essentially, transaction services create and update data.

(b)
Data Services -- These services read, display and analyze the data that has been created -- typically with transaction services. Data services help business users make long-term as well as day-to-day business decisions. Data services help provide insight into an organization, and they can reveal long-term trends such as correlation between revenue growth and product quality, as well as up-to-the-minute insight such as order status by customer.

(c)
Services Registry -- This serves as a directory for all the services available in an SOA. A registry contains the definition, location, parameters and output for each service. It provides a simple and standards-based means for publishing and discovering reusable services. It is often the center for SOA governance, providing visibility, reliability and control of all services.

(d)
Orchestration Technology -- Also known as Business Process Management (BPM), orchestration ties together services in a coherent manner, and coordinates interactions among services. It manages the interoperability of all services.

These four components work together to provide the agility that one expects to derive from an SOA. Transaction and data services provide the much talked about, loosely coupled services that expose a company's systems as small, independent, yet interoperable pieces.

How and what each service does is listed in the services registry. Developers look up the services that they need in the registry and tie these services together using an orchestration tool to build a business solution. Because components, particularly the transaction and data services, are standards-based and interoperable, they enable companies to quickly and easily build business solutions.

Although every component is necessary for a fully functional SOA, the data services component is arguably the least talked about.

Data services and transactions are often lumped together without distinction. Though each type of service behaves differently (as briefly described above), the technologies used to create or enable each type of service are dissimilar. In addition, industry analysts predict that the ratio of Web services that are data services will out-number transaction services by three to two. This highlights the significance of data services as more companies deploy SOAs.

Best-of-breed data services should meet several criteria in order to be valuable and useful within an SOA. Data services should deliver data from a variety of sources, including traditional databases, XML documents and files, as well as information from complex packaged applications. Other criteria include:

* Data abstraction and integration -- The main benefit of data services is to abstract (hide) the complexity of data from the consumer or user. So data services should provide business information that is not limited to the applications' APIs or the database schema. They should simplify display and utilization by pulling data from multiple APIs within a single application, or from multiple applications and databases, before combining it. They should convert raw data into meaningful information through transformations, functions, reshaping, aliasing, joining and filtering.

* Protection of critical applications and data -- One of the benefits of an SOA is that data is easily accessible and usable. Unfortunately, this benefit has the potential drawback of unintended access. Data services must guard applications against excessively frequent queries by caching and reusing query results. They should also protect applications and databases from unintended access by participating in their original entitlement systems, thereby adding an extra layer of security. They should prevent unintended consequences of change to important systems by utilizing non-invasive access mechanisms.

* Enterprise-ready -- An SOA promises that data is available enterprise-wide, and is not limited to smaller subsets like individual departments. Data services should meet major enterprise-readiness criteria, including high performance, enterprise scalability, and high availability.

* Easy and rapid deployment -- This may be the most important criterion. Nothing sours users faster than promises of benefits that do not become reality for a long time. One way to ensure easy and rapid deployment is using templates of pre-built services to help an organization get up and running quickly.

Some enterprises may attempt to take short cuts to data services by using technologies like enterprise application integration (EAI) or application server technology, which are better suited to transaction services. However, these products are not designed for optimized queries, data abstraction or integration, nor do they provide protection against unintended access. The result is likely to be a solution that works in the development environment, but fails in the production environment.

As companies get serious about SOAs, they will no doubt discover that implementation is complex and filled with lots of little details.

Defining SOAs into four major components will help make implementation more manageable. All components play a critical role -- including data services, which should not be neglected or short-circuited.

A best-of-breed data services solution should include the core capabilities of data integration, data protection and enterprise readiness. A best-of-breed data services solution is also critical to implementing a fully-functional SOA.

Source: Line 56

Have your website professionally optimized by the search engine positioning experts at Rank for $ales. If your site has dropped in rankings since November 16, 2003, contact the search engine positioning experts at Rank for Sales.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

For the best technical information on hardware, software, Internet applications, e-Commerce, B2B, Web services or IT-related industry news, visit Tech Blog.

Reciprocal Link Exchange Program: If your company is engaged in the business of Web Services, the development of related Internet application, ecommerce or B2B development, Internet security services, Web hosting services or is involved in professional Search Engine Optimization, My Web Services is seriously interested in a worthwhile Reciprocal Link Exchange Trading Program with your company. Click here to get all the details.

Sponsored by Internet Trends      Sponsored by LCWHG      Sponsored by ISEN

Powered by W. W. H.         Protected by Internet Security.ca         Sponsored by Marketing Trends

Built by Montreal Web Design        Sponsored by Press Broadcast        Sponsored by Businessblog™

Have your advertorials and infomercials written by experts.