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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Analyze SOA readiness for a company

















Six questions to analyze if your company is ready for SOA

In today’s extremely competitive world, any business needs a robust yet adaptable IT infrastructure. The growing information needs make it imperative to replace the old systems with new enterprise applications. And even enterprise applications need to upgrade from time to time. Your organization ends up spending a large amount of the IT budget in managing integrations with each new release and upgrade. You must protect the investments in existing applications and leverage the returns from existing systems. Only then your organization can improve the responsiveness of its changing business needs.


1)  Is your IT expense more on managing your applications and their integrations? Will you incur a huge cost when you will migrate or upgrade your existing applications?
If the answer to the above is yes, your organization is the right candidate for SOA. By using Service-Oriented Architecture, you can protect yourself against spending huge budgets with every new application, new release and upgrade without worrying about the integration and interoperability aspects. Applications can work together without relying on custom-coded point-to-point connections. This enables decoupling and enhances flexibility. The cost that otherwise would have been spent on complex integration scenarios can be protected by introducing Service-Oriented Architecture much before the problem becomes a nightmare.

2) Protect your Future Now - Embark on SOA Wave today                          
New business scenarios are inevitable that force the systems for upgrade. When a system upgrade undergoes any migration, all its interfaces with other systems get affected. Integration becomes challenging and a high expense activity. Imagine a scenario where your company is undergoing a merger or is in the acquisition process. There will be plethora of application stacks that will emerge in the IT landscape of the organization. The result is stovepipes of applications exchanging information, which is highly fragmented; the processes are application-driven, inconsistent and inefficient. Integrations, if they are point-to-point interfaces, are difficult and costly to change.

3) Gear Up For SOA - What are the most common mistakes while implementing SOA?
To protect your existing and future investments, it is essential that the technology you pick up to develop your Service-Oriented Architecture adheres to industry standards and has a strong vendor support. At the same time, it is vital to know that Service-Oriented Architecture is not just a design or technology, there is something beyond, and that is your business process.  Choose the right consulting partner that can be trusted and provide a future-proof solution as well as full lifecycle support.
Most common mistakes that are made in SOA initiatives are:
  • Failure to assess SOA maturity level and defining appropriate road map
  • Failure to obtain buy-in from all stakeholders and internal application owners
  • Failure to identify common data models leading to frequent changes
  • Tendency to build point-to-point interfaces even with SOA
  • Failure to set up a PMO team for audits and reviews for SOA Governance

4) Do not struggle - Get a framework to build SOA
The path to SOA is challenging. We must realize it early. According to Gartner, “By 2010, less that 25 percent of large companies will have the sufficient technical and organizational skills necessary to deliver enterprise-wide SOA.” One big reason why SOA initiatives fail or do not get enough momentum is lack of reference architecture and a robust framework. Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) provides a robust yet flexible architecture. You may look at AIA as an application-independent standardized framework based on the common object model. A majority of enterprise applications are monolithic within individual lines of business – and this makes coordinating activity between them very difficult. A composite application based on common object model is the new direction where technologists are heading for. A composite application automates business processes across the boundaries of multiple applications and is future-proof. However it is a laborious, complex and time-consuming task to build composite applications. Oracle AIA simplifies this process and makes it more seamless - and far less costly.

5)    Do not re-invent the wheel - Leverage Oracle AIA
AIA brings to the table the following key components:
  • Best Practice Processes - To leverage best practices available out-of-the-box
  • AIA Foundation Pack - You can create custom business processes across any of your applications utilizing pre-defined, application independent objects and service definitions
  • Process Integration Packs - Pre-built, out-of-the-box, integrated services for quick implementation of business processes, without the risks

AIA is built on top of SOA, an open standards-based platform. It enables you to:
  • Expedite your Enterprise SOA initiative
  • Build adaptable composite processes
  • Stop redeveloping integrations with every new release and upgrade
  • Focus on core business, and not on integration nightmares

6) Choose a right partner
Choosing a right consulting partner is a key success factor. With vast experience in SOA implementations across the globe and a strong workforce, Infosys can help you in your SOA journey reinforced with Oracle AIA. Our customers have chosen the Oracle AIA path to strengthen their SOA initiatives. We can provide you future-proof solutions with full lifecycle support.

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