Service-Oriented Architecture - A Key Factor in Global Business Excellence
The Value Proposition of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
The past four decades have witnessed the unfolding of bourgeoning complexity of enterprise software development in keeping pace with continually dynamic and diverse needs of IT organizations. Though there are plenty of computing architectures with cross-platform and cross-programming language compatibility, the traditional “Point Solutions” do not seem to enable organization to respond swiftly to the business, customer and technological challenges. Service-Oriented Architecture is being embraced as the new age IT mantra to facilitate organization to attempt lowering costs, reducing cycle times, integration across the enterprise, B2B and B2C integration, greater ROI, creating an adaptive and responsive
business model. SOA is precisely an architectural and distribution computing solution with enhanced, low-cost interoperability through open standards. It is a collection of loosely coupled, independent services with invokable interfaces.
SOA Vs. Web Services
To start with, SOA must be contrasted with web services. Web services is a set of technologies such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI which provides answers to the challenges of messaging and application integrations. These and other technologies may further mature, or be substituted with more advanced technologies.
SOA in a Nutshell
However, SOA goes beyond such technologies, and is entirely independent of them. These technologies makes grounds for SOA to happen. In essence, SOA is a compendium of loosely coupled, independent services, wherein communication can happen in terms of passing of data, or services coordinating a particular activity and requires connecting medium to each other. History tells that the first instance of SOA was through DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification.
Let’s see how a research paper titled Migrating to a Service-Oriented Architecture, Part 1 by a specialist IBM team defines SOA:
“…a pure architectural definition of a SOA might be something like "an application architecture within which all functions are defined as independent services with well-defined invokable interfaces which can be called in defined sequences to form business processes.”
Trails of SOA Success Stories in the Travel World, Which Hit the Headlines
United Airlines implemented SOA approach to take to the next level the existing J2EE middleware layer to integrate its large assortments of IBM and Unisys mainframes. The result is SOA and open-standards driven system, known as EasyFIDS. EasyFIDS is a flight information system, divulging real time information about flight status at airport monitors, crew at different airports, for Federal Aviation Administration, for passengers, and more. It demonstrates the multi-dimensional communication capability of the newly designed system.
Scandinavian Airlines International (SAS) has initiated a one-year project to migrate the services from the existing mainframe applications to a set of three new distributed systems that will pave the way for real time messaging. This is fundamentally a SOA via an enterprise service bus (ESB) which is conceived to function as an intermediate layer of middleware allowing the airlines map data from disparate systems, route messages, ascertain that services are delivered in the right order and impose security rules. This SOA project would reduce IT maintenance costs by $250,000 once it is implemented, registering a potential savings of $3 million a year.
Railinc, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Association of Railroads, made SOA in action and migrated from its legacy EDI system to an SOA-based system, which can manage 5.8 millions messages each day for 1500 trading partners/customers and can also track and monitor seven million units of equipment.
Marriot Hotels has chosen SOA application in order to respond promptly to changes in the hotel market. This is supposed to provide easy integration with partners like web sites, which facilitates online hotel bookings. It is believed that reusability of the proposed system would lower development costs and render new value to the organization.
Seaport Hotel is currently seeing the development of Seaportal, an in-room communication platform, based on service architecture to take communications to the next level, thereby enriching customer experiences. Seaportal exploits VoIP, unified communications, SOA, web services, and external information sources with a touch screen to achieve a paying IP convergence.
Lufthansa and United Airlines, members of a consortium known as the Star Alliance has recently migrated its four decades old reservation system which was developed in assembly language to SOA which includes the entire array of operations like reservations, inventory and passenger check-in. Now, Lufthansa and United Airlines are considering a roadmap to develop a common platform to be used by other members of the consortium. According to an article in CIO, this The modernization project will impact 20,000 people in 350 locations in a three- to four-year time frame, and it will touch 20 company divisions.
SOA is driving the cost cutting campaign at Delta Airlines. This is possible through reuse value proposition, and it is lowering the cost of ownerships of a variety of software systems. Bret Martin, who is principal enterprise architecture for Delta Technology Inc reasons, “Reuse is one of the big drivers for our SOA environment.”
That’s why Delta is reusing the same customer and operational data for different applications like Delta.com web site, ticketing kiosks, ticketing counter, gate systems.
The past four decades have witnessed the unfolding of bourgeoning complexity of enterprise software development in keeping pace with continually dynamic and diverse needs of IT organizations. Though there are plenty of computing architectures with cross-platform and cross-programming language compatibility, the traditional “Point Solutions” do not seem to enable organization to respond swiftly to the business, customer and technological challenges. Service-Oriented Architecture is being embraced as the new age IT mantra to facilitate organization to attempt lowering costs, reducing cycle times, integration across the enterprise, B2B and B2C integration, greater ROI, creating an adaptive and responsive
business model. SOA is precisely an architectural and distribution computing solution with enhanced, low-cost interoperability through open standards. It is a collection of loosely coupled, independent services with invokable interfaces.
SOA Vs. Web Services
To start with, SOA must be contrasted with web services. Web services is a set of technologies such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI which provides answers to the challenges of messaging and application integrations. These and other technologies may further mature, or be substituted with more advanced technologies.
SOA in a Nutshell
However, SOA goes beyond such technologies, and is entirely independent of them. These technologies makes grounds for SOA to happen. In essence, SOA is a compendium of loosely coupled, independent services, wherein communication can happen in terms of passing of data, or services coordinating a particular activity and requires connecting medium to each other. History tells that the first instance of SOA was through DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification.
Let’s see how a research paper titled Migrating to a Service-Oriented Architecture, Part 1 by a specialist IBM team defines SOA:
“…a pure architectural definition of a SOA might be something like "an application architecture within which all functions are defined as independent services with well-defined invokable interfaces which can be called in defined sequences to form business processes.”
Trails of SOA Success Stories in the Travel World, Which Hit the Headlines
United Airlines implemented SOA approach to take to the next level the existing J2EE middleware layer to integrate its large assortments of IBM and Unisys mainframes. The result is SOA and open-standards driven system, known as EasyFIDS. EasyFIDS is a flight information system, divulging real time information about flight status at airport monitors, crew at different airports, for Federal Aviation Administration, for passengers, and more. It demonstrates the multi-dimensional communication capability of the newly designed system.
Scandinavian Airlines International (SAS) has initiated a one-year project to migrate the services from the existing mainframe applications to a set of three new distributed systems that will pave the way for real time messaging. This is fundamentally a SOA via an enterprise service bus (ESB) which is conceived to function as an intermediate layer of middleware allowing the airlines map data from disparate systems, route messages, ascertain that services are delivered in the right order and impose security rules. This SOA project would reduce IT maintenance costs by $250,000 once it is implemented, registering a potential savings of $3 million a year.
Railinc, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Association of Railroads, made SOA in action and migrated from its legacy EDI system to an SOA-based system, which can manage 5.8 millions messages each day for 1500 trading partners/customers and can also track and monitor seven million units of equipment.
Marriot Hotels has chosen SOA application in order to respond promptly to changes in the hotel market. This is supposed to provide easy integration with partners like web sites, which facilitates online hotel bookings. It is believed that reusability of the proposed system would lower development costs and render new value to the organization.
Seaport Hotel is currently seeing the development of Seaportal, an in-room communication platform, based on service architecture to take communications to the next level, thereby enriching customer experiences. Seaportal exploits VoIP, unified communications, SOA, web services, and external information sources with a touch screen to achieve a paying IP convergence.
Lufthansa and United Airlines, members of a consortium known as the Star Alliance has recently migrated its four decades old reservation system which was developed in assembly language to SOA which includes the entire array of operations like reservations, inventory and passenger check-in. Now, Lufthansa and United Airlines are considering a roadmap to develop a common platform to be used by other members of the consortium. According to an article in CIO, this The modernization project will impact 20,000 people in 350 locations in a three- to four-year time frame, and it will touch 20 company divisions.
SOA is driving the cost cutting campaign at Delta Airlines. This is possible through reuse value proposition, and it is lowering the cost of ownerships of a variety of software systems. Bret Martin, who is principal enterprise architecture for Delta Technology Inc reasons, “Reuse is one of the big drivers for our SOA environment.”
That’s why Delta is reusing the same customer and operational data for different applications like Delta.com web site, ticketing kiosks, ticketing counter, gate systems.
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