Service–Oriented Architecture

Service–Oriented Architecture is an IT strategy that organizes the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards–based services that can be combined and reused quickly to meet business needs.

By organizing enterprise IT around services instead of around applications, SOA provides key benefits:

• Improves productivity, agility and speed for both Business and IT
• Allows IT to deliver services faster and align closer with business
• Allows the business to respond quicker and deliver optimal user experience
• Masks the underlying technical complexity of the IT environment

This results in more rapid development and more reliable delivery of new and enhanced business services.

Today, organizations that have adopted service–oriented environments are experiencing dramatic results, including increased revenues, increased customer satisfaction, lower operational costs, and higher returns on their existing technology investments.

Alliance Technologies can help your business develop a vision and a roadmap to improve business responsiveness by simplifying enterprise computing.

Meeting Today's Business Challenges

The pace of your business is moving faster than ever. With customers, partners, and employees expecting higher–quality service–twenty four hours a day, seven days a week–it is nearly impossible for today's enterprises to keep up.

Particularly overwhelmed is the IT staff, which has been tasked with:

• Improving Operational Efficiency: Making existing investments achieve higher productivity, which in turn, means improving the way business is conducted, and overall business processes. In particular, preserving and expanding new strategic development efforts, amidst shrinking budgets and expensive, ongoing maintenance costs, and trying to "do more with less" in virtually every area of the business.
• Improving Customer Responsiveness: Needing to be more responsive to stakeholders that support the business–whether they are internal or external customers–rests largely on IT, including gathering and using the information flowing through the business no matter where it is, and making it available to the people who need it to do their jobs.
• Improving Business Agility: Needing to rapidly adapt the business, including internal and external touch points, as the business changes, and avoiding having to begin from scratch with new applications and infrastructure as business requirements change.

With these significant tasks already at hand, how can IT meet the ever–increasing need to achieve faster time to value? The answer is in developing and deploying a service–oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA approach better aligns IT with business goals and enables IT organizations to re–use assets, deliver value, faster, to the business, and more easily support ongoing requirements for change.

Why Adopt SOA?

A service–oriented architecture (SOA) is a higher level of application development that enables IT to focus on business processes, rather than the underlying IT infrastructure, to achieve competitive advantage.

SOA is valuable to enterprises that need to solve business–critical problems using information technology, including enterprises that want to minimize redundant infrastructure and create a common business interface across customer and employee systems; businesses that need to personalize information to users based on roles and workflows; and organizations that want to use the Internet to boost revenue per customer through cross–selling, up–selling and access via mobile devices.

Enterprises that adopt a service–driven approach experience the following business and IT benefits:

Business Benefits of Service–Oriented Architecture

• Efficiency: Transform business processes from siloed, replicated processes into highly leveraged, shared services that cost less to maintain.
• Responsiveness: Rapid adaptation and delivery of key business services to meet market demands for increased service levels to customers, employees, and partners.
• Adaptability: More effectively rollout changes throughout the business with minimal complexity and effort, saving time and money.

IT Benefits of Service–Oriented Architecture

• Reduced Complexity: Standards–based compatibility versus point–to–point integration reduces complexity
• Increased Reuse: More efficient application/project development and delivery through the reuse of shared services, previously developed and deployed
• Legacy Integration: Legacy applications, leveraged as re–usable services, lowers the cost of maintenance and integration

Today's service–driven enterprises are experiencing these benefits and more as they leverage IT in the rapid development and reliable delivery of new and enhanced services in order to maximize business opportunities.

SOA Enterprise Considerations

The service–driven enterprise is optimized around service—efficiently servicing customers, partners and employees—and accelerating the service response time of the business. Yet, achieving a service–driven enterprise requires more than just deploying products. Organizations interested in implementing a service–driven foundation will want to engage an experienced SOA provider with services that can help both business and IT stakeholders as they consider the following:

Business Strategy & Process – Does the current business and IT strategy include a framework for SOA. Once articulated in an aligned business and IT strategy, business problems can be defined and solutions can be implemented, in a coherent, repeatable way.

Architecture – Enterprises must develop an architectural framework that allows the assembly of components and services for the rapid and dynamic delivery of solutions. The architecture focuses on reuse and leverage, and avoids stovepipe applications and islands of IT resources.

Costs & Benefits – In an SOA, responsiveness is improved with development and maintenance costs significantly reduced, providing compelling cost–benefit analysis.

Projects & Applications – SOA enables a new way of building applications within a more powerful and flexible programming model. The Organization needs to identify existing and "in flight" applications that will be incorporated into the SOA architecture.

Building Blocks – Both an architecture and a programming model, SOA is a way of thinking about building software. The enterprise needs to identify the building blocks–code, services, applications and components–that can be used and reused in a SOA implementation.

Organization & Governance – Roles and responsibilities need to be identified for new service–oriented IT organizations and optimize skill sets for success, as well as organizing an effective design "Reuse Factory," helping to define governance models and ultimately ensuring customer self–sufficiency in running the governance office.

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