SOA in Action Blog

SOA alone may not get the US auto companies through their current tough predicament, but it certainly is helping to alleviate some of the stresses these organizations are facing in their operations. One area that automakers may keep doing well, in fact, is in their responsiveness to customer service requests, thanks to recent implementations of service oriented architecture approaches.

At a session entitled "SOA to the Rescue - Maximizing Your IT Budget in a Down Economy," part of ebizQ's latest SOA in Action conference, Mohan Udyavar, lead architect with Wipro Technologies, described how his firm helped create an enterprise hub which "orchestrates all the information in real-time and aggregates this content and provides the service to a customer service portal." The firm employed Oracle's BPEL Process Manager to provide "a real-time rendering of the data within the portal -- so it cannot take more than five or six seconds to render the page so it has to build a content in a very fast fashion."

Employing SOA strategies -- which also incorporate BPEL and Software-as-a-Service approaches -- are part of the innovations companies are undergoing to realign processes, and, in the process, cut operational costs, Udyavar explained. "When we need to reduce operational costs, we have to look at our business process. There might be some integration, there might be sort of manual activities and we might be losing out a lot of revenue in that business process."

Udyavar was joined by Maneesh Joshi, senior group manager for product marketing at Oracle, who described the crucial role SOA will play in any downturn. Historically, he said, the strong have used such tumultuous times to get stronger, and be well positioned for the next economic boom. He cited a McKinsey study of more than 1,000 companies from the period of 1982 to 1999. "What they found were the companies that emerged, as leaders out of recession were the ones who had invested the most in their infrastructure during the recessionary period.  So instead of just holding cash and cutting down cost, they were actually innovating - they were actually investing in the infrastructure and getting themselves for the boom times."

This advantage is tied back to wisely investing in IT, Joshi relates. Another McKinsey study concluded is that instead of cutting down IT investments, companies "should do targeted investments which will in the long run when the expansion time comes will help companies to grow their savings but also support their competition," he explained.

This is where service oriented architecture comes in, Joshi and Udyava said. Not only does SOA play a role in keeping operational expenses down, but also in increasing flexibility and agility -- the key ingredients for growth. Companies may have thinner margins, and therefore need to "react fast to the change in the market trend and be ahead of the curve, be ahead of the competitors," said Udyava. "To do that, their business processes should be agile and they should be able to add new functionality into the business process without adding too much cost or development cost into it."

Business activity monitoring is another key strategy for getting through turbulent times. BAM gives companies "an ear, an intelligence or data aggregator. But what we need is a real-time intelligence that's the process that are executing so that it can react faster in this economic downturn," said Udyava. "Again, a SOA driver, SOA fits in very well in addressing these concerns." 

Third, SOA plays a role in making it easier for companies to break into new markets. "If they're going into the emerging markets, they don't want to start out their business processes from scratch," Udyava explains. "They want to have some shrink-wrap business processes and then 'plug in' the local business services so that they can quickly operate in this new market. They don't want to spend a lot of money on that and that's again the strength of a SOA implementation."

A replay of the session, "SOA to the Rescue - Maximizing Your IT Budget in a Down Economy," is available for viewing. A full transcript of the session is also available here.