Solving Your Biggest Business Problems with SOA

By Dale Ferrario
VP of Engineering

Welcome to the first edition of Sun Integration Insights. For enterprises everywhere, service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is a critical initiative — with tremendous potential to help companies address today’s greatest business challenges. Those that embrace it will find themselves far ahead in the ability to compete and succeed. Those that don’t will lose. It’s that simple.

I think this forum provides an outstanding opportunity to look at some of the ways in which SOA is transforming business. In that spirit, I’m looking forward to using it as a vehicle for moving SOA out of the conceptual realm and into the real world. In each edition of Sun Integration Insights, we’ll explore today’s pressing business challenges and how they’re driving SOA in the enterprise, using real-world examples to illustrate the practical value and absolute necessity of SOA.

This time, we’ll be looking at the need to deliver new services to customers, employees, and others with whom enterprises interact in an environment where getting there fast defines success — and getting there last knocks you out of the race. In future editions, we’ll look at challenges such as providing a single view of your customers, increasing the value of the services you deliver, complying with the growing tangle of regulatory requirements, and many others. And we’ll see just how companies are using SOA to tackle them.

One step at a time with Sun
When you hear words like “transforming,” “revolutionary,” and “absolute necessity,” it’s easy to become concerned about not just what SOA can do for your business, but what it’s going to take from your business to put it in place. You already have a software infrastructure in which you’ve invested considerable resources. And now you’re going to have to give it all up for the next big thing?

In a word, no.

SOA’s potential for business transformation may be tremendous, but what’s great about Sun’s approach to SOA is that it doesn’t demand an equally tremendous investment of your time and resources. It’s not about replacing your existing software infrastructure; it’s about leveraging it. With Sun, SOA isn’t so much a dramatic change as it is an evolution. You can take it one step at a time — adapt what you have already to handle a new project, for example, and then add to what you’ve done with each new challenge that comes up.

But I promised to talk about SOA in the real world. So read on.

The go-to-market challenge
Within an SOA environment, companies can create business solutions in days or weeks, instead of months or years. The architecture by definition treats technology assets as services; within an SOA, those services can be readily combined in infinite new ways to meet growing and changing customer demands.

For example, Sun recently worked with one of the world’s leading providers of wireless communications services on using an SOA to deliver more services to customers’ phones. To illustrate the possibilities that an SOA could open up to them, Sun created a prototype of 17 new services to be delivered to the handset. By combining or composing existing capabilities in the company’s software infrastructure with others from outside to develop the new services, we were able to deliver all 17 in less than a month-and-a-half.

For example, to deliver a service that would allow security-conscious parents to plot their child’s comings and goings by cell phone, we simply combined existing phone number, GPS, and map capabilities to create an entirely new capability. That’s the power of SOA: the ability to quickly and efficiently combine things together in new ways and, as a result, deliver something of value to customers.

Beyond business benefits
The telecommunications company example is a good illustration of how an SOA can help a company create new ways to satisfy customers and generate revenue. But the same principles can work in virtually any organization.

• Public-sector organizations such as public utilities or transportation can use SOA to improve customer service by linking front- and back-end business processes to enable real-time online operations.
• Financial services providers can use SOA to streamline processes such as loan approvals by creating a single secure view of multiple relevant information components — such as the applicant’s credit standing, the bank’s existing loan volume, and current money rates.
• Hospitals and clinics can use SOA to create a secure information-delivery architecture for the exchange of sensitive medical information. With an SOA, IT can integrate data and identity management features for protecting confidential data and exposing shared services only to authorized users.

The point is, no matter what type of organization, or how it interacts with the people it serves, an SOA opens up a whole new world of possibilities for real-world success.

Look for this column to explore other business challenges in the months to come. And look for Sun Integration Insights to bring you important information about SOA technology, ROI, and much more.