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SOA's best when business pulls the strings



David Rubinstein
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April 15, 2010 —  (Page 2 of 5)
HP encourages organizations considering a SOA implementation to first look at their application set at the business-process level, asking how the application is enabling the realization of business goals. “When we look at enterprise transformation, it is done in the context of business objectives and IT,” said Nadhan.

Some applications might be fine the way they are, he said, while in other cases, business processes might need to be updated or improved, or requirements have changed. In those cases, the application might need to be retired or rewritten, or a pre-built off-the-shelf application might fill the business need. “You don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he cautioned.

In still other circumstances, you might have an application that works just fine—it’s robust and reliable—but people are no longer happy with the user experience. “You can create a façade that’s state of the art, but behind the scenes, it’s the legacy app that’s running.”

HP’s Tom Hall, global offering manager for the company's SOA and Integration Services, HP Enterprise Services, discussed the AirlineSOA platform the company helped create, which serves as a reference architecture for the company. One legacy application, the airline seat map, had all the code, workflow, point-to-point interfaces and application logic tightly integrated. And, he said, at one time it served the airline industry well, before airlines changed rules regarding sitting in an exit row or upgrading to a better seat. It’s no longer a static process, he said.

“Every time you needed to implement any kind of change, you had to change the application,” he said. “Now it’s a composite seat-map service, with an interface, externalized business rules that are easy to change to meet demands, with utility security services at the bottom. It all doesn’t have to be encapsulated or hard-coded in the application,” said Nadhan.

ZapThink’s Bloomberg agrees with the assertion that moving to a service-oriented architecture should be driven by the business. “SOA is not about the tools. It’s a set of best practices for organizing IT to meet changing business needs. The technologer is an enabler” of the business, he said.



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