Listen to the entire podcast Download file

Joe McKendrick: Hello! This is Joe McKendrick, contributor to ebizQ's "SOA in Action" site. Thank you for joining us for this podcast on the important issues, as well as tremendous opportunities, Enterprises face around service-oriented architecture today. It's my pleasure to introduce Ashish Mahendru, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle is a premiere sponsor of Info World's upcoming SOA Executive Forum and Ashish will be sharing some of his insights on the state of SOA progress in 2007.

Ashish, I understand you'll be speaking at Info World Executive Forum. Can you give us a brief sneak preview on what you'll be talking about?

AM: Definitely, Joe. The topic of my presentation is going to be about building the business case for SOA. What we are seeing with our customer base today, is there's a lot of interest in SOA. And a lot of IT interest particularly in SOA. But these IT organizations are having somewhat of a difficult time in terms of securing funding for their projects, be it investing in new SOA projects or expanding on existing point programs into Enterprise-scale architectures.

So my conversation, or my presentation at the Info World event, is going to be discussing those issues and how organizations can build a better case for the CFOs and CEOs to get additional investment into the strategic of SOA projects.

JM: Great, great! That sounds really interesting. And now on to our discussion of the state of SOA in 2007. First, let's talk about the current SOA, or S-O-A, I guess we pronounce it both ways, realities on the ground at enterprises. How far along are companies with their SOA initiatives? Are you seeing full-functioning implementations now or are people still on a learning curve?

AM: It's a combination, Joe. A couple of years ago, the major emphasis was about education about SOA. And about the value that SOA brings to an enterprise. Today, we believe that a majority of the companies have crossed that hump and have actually bought into the religion of SOA and they are starting to invest into specific point projects for SOA. So they're starting to take simple implementations where they would have used point-to-point integration techniques to connect two disparate applications. Today they are actually moving towards the SOA-based architecture of connecting these applications together, or optimizing or automating business processes.

So we have seen a lot of these diverse projects taking place within the customer base. But they are still in the very early stages. Because they really haven't got the full religion of SOA. They are trying to see and trying to drive value out of these projects. And they need help in turning those point projects into enterprise-scale architectures across the board.

JM: So there's still plenty of work to be done out there.

AM: Absolutely.

JM: And of course--that takes us to our next question. Everyone is talking about the importance of governance within this SOA environment. Can you describe how exactly governance keeps these initiatives on track? Why is governance so important as your SOA begins to grow?

AM: Well, if you look at the way companies approach enterprise architecture, these projects in the past. You know, they were very much siloed and departmental-centric. And companies of those particular IT departments had complete control over their specific project. Now when we talk about SOA, it is about breaking down these silos, breaking down these departmental barriers. And having a uniformed architectural approach across the enterprise. Now, what that entails is giving up control in some cases and having a clear understanding of what constitutes the service. Who has access rights to the service? Who manages the services? Who pays for the services? How do you change these services? How do you define policy?

A lot of these issues start creeping up because now there is not one direct control, centralized control that they used to have in the past. So there's a lot of tension that could emerge between different departments if it's not handled correctly upfront as they progress in the journey towards SOA. So the whole idea behind governance is to really define a path of how a company can start from a point project and then scale it out by breaking down the departmental barriers across the enterprise, putting in the organization structure along with the technology structure that is required to be successful in these projects.

JM: And at the core, or the foundation of SOA, of course, are the services that are developed and deployed by your various business units. I'm sure it's a challenge within large enterprises especially. How do you make sure that the services that are being generated, are being requested, that are being deployed by various business units are the right fit for the requirements of your business?

AM: Well, there has to be a structure that's created which we call like a standard body or service body, within the organization, which kind of monitors this and sets up an enterprise-scale standard that everyone has to conform to. So, just say I'm going to create a repository of all the services within my enterprise, and I'm going to be done with it. That's not what we mean here by governance. What we really mean by governance in this case is having a standard of service that has to pass certain parameters. It has to be defined in a specific manner. It has to meet a certain service-level agreement. And it has to conform to the specifications that have been defined by this governing body within the organization.

Once you conform to that standard and that specification, now you have a framework through which you build your enterprise skill services, that could be registered in the registry and a metadata can be defined in the repository, which makes it very easy for companies to change policies or change definitions without going back into the hard process of manually recording these policies and structures into individual Web service.

JM: Great. And another emerging trend that we're hearing a lot about these days is the whole Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena, which is a great deal of overlap, of course, with SOA. With these Web 2.0 methodologies, users can create mash-ups, which are front-end applications that can draw data and access applications across the Web. Do you see mash-ups playing a role in SOA as well?

AM: Absolutely. If you think about the basic premise of both SOA and mash-ups, it's all Web 2.0. It's basically about two things. One is the increased user productivity and the other is increased reuse of existing assets. So, if I'm looking at mash-ups and if I'm able to mix and mash different Web site content, to deliver a new page or a new service to my end user. That's a great thing, a great addition to your infrastructure because now I can quickly assemble new content pages. I can assemble new services which in the past would have taken me a longer time because I had to build everything from scratch.

The same is true with SOA, because the SOA is a lot about re-use. You have existing assets. You've already invested heavily into maybe your legacy systems. Your mainframes. Your package applications. You don't want to rip everything out and throw it away. What you really want to do is bring those existing assets into modern infrastructure, a modern architecture. And a combination of Web 2.0 mash-ups with SOA is the entire framework of building a next generation applications. Specifically, still looking into investing in composites apps where 80 percent of your functionality might come from preexisting assets and you're filling in the delta of 20 percent by writing additional code or modeling new processes on top on it.

JM: Great. And finally, there's been a lot of excitement growing around another Web 2.0 type of service, which is software-as-a-service, or SaaS. Which also can employ to some extent, SOA-based services but coming out of third party-firms. How do you see getting, can SAS play a role in breaking the application bottlenecks within your enterprise?

AM: Absolutely! I mean, SAS and SOA, I would say SaaS without SOA is going to be an incomplete infrastructure or architecture for a company. Because if, think of software as service. The basis premise of SOA is providing service that can be accessed any time from any place, regardless of where it is actually generated from, or delivered from. Now software-as-service is more about taking a service, which is externally delivered by a business partner, that you can turn on or switch off, based on the requirements. So if you have a well-planned SOA infrastructure, it becomes very easy for companies to plug in place different external services that are offered as software as service and to meet the business requirements.

Now, for example, if I had a payroll system within my company, now that payroll system I want to actually turn that system off and switch on a software as service that provides me a payroll service. If I have a SOA infrastructure, it becomes very easy for me. Because all I'm doing is, I'm taking the same Web service and I'm making a different call which is being provided by an external provider.

So it becomes very easy for me to switch from one set of services to another, which in the past with a traditional monolithic architecture, you would have a very difficult time doing because you would have to phase and migrate out all the procedural calls, all the external API calls you're making to that particular application, make sure that you have turned off or switched all system relationships with that application and then have to kind of hard code some of these integration points with the software-as-a-service provider.

With SOA as your basic infrastructure principle, it becomes a lot easier for you to now plug and play different services to meet your business requirements and a much more, in a much more cost-effective manner.

JM: Great, well, thank you, Ashish! Again, this is Joe McKendrick for ebizQ and I've been speaking with Ashish Mohindaroo, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware, who will be leading a session at Info World's SOA Executive Forum. Thank you, Ashish.

AM: --Thank you.

Learn more at Oracle's Web Site