TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Getting SOA Right

Stan Gibson | Date: 10-28-09 | Comments

The multiyear, multimillion-dollar SOA project is a tough sell, but SOA benefits abound.

Table of Contents:

Getting SOA Right - Master Data Model

Fred Nay, director of computing services at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., called on SOA to solve a specific problem: parents weren�t getting fundraising letters because their names were in multiple databases, often with different addresses. The goal was to resolve the address conflicts by having just a single address for each person � and having that address available to all applications that might have need of it.

The result was a Master Data Model, implemented on a SQL Server database running on an HP server. The addresses in the MDM database are made available to applications via an IBM Websphere Enterprise Service Bus on an IBM zSeries mainframe.

�As you start building these services you find out you can reuse them again. That is pretty cool. Now we can solve new problems in real time,� Nay says.

Nay and his team implemented students� course schedules as reusable Web services. �Now any application can just call it up. It�s kind of like a good subroutine,� he adds.

The push to expand SOA implementations is not unusual, according to Randy Heffner, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. A recent Forrester survey found that SOA is widely prevalent at companies of all sizes and that investment in SOA is growing. The survey, which sampled opinion in the fourth quarter of 2008 after the economic crisis hit found that 60 percent of current SOA users are expanding their use of SOA.

Although Nay and other IT pros who were early to implement SOA are enjoying the integration benefits of an ESB, an ESB is not needed to begin enjoying the benefits of SOA, Heffner points out. �You can get benefits from SOA without buying anything,� the analyst says. �You can implement SOA for .Net and Java so that you create a Web service on .Net to be accessed from Java. Between Java and .Net, Web services are a pretty good way to communicate. You don�t have to buy anything. That trips people up. They think SOA is a big thing � that you have to buy a lot of products.�

Whether leveraging a big legacy SOA project or simply enabling applications to interact via standard Web services, the best way to get the most out of SOA is to �live the SOA,� by getting key IT and business people on board and then making sure that all new software projects implement SOA wherever possible.

�We wanted to centralize and leverage our assets. So we set up a center of excellence for SOA and all software,� said Benjacar at ILIM.

Toronto Hydro is doing much the same. �Our plan it so to have each of the new systems come with their own budget for using the SOA infrastructure,� said Eduardo Bresani, CIO of Toronto Hydro, which set up a competency center that includes members of various IT groups who have been trained in SOA.
�The technology part of it is relatively straightforward,� says Yee of Int3s, adding, �The key thing is to have the right governance practices around it. It is a cultural shift so you have to force it at the beginning. But once it�s established, it carries itself.�