The World of SOA and EDA

I bumped into this Profit Online Magazine page that shares 5 ideas about SOA.

I feel Basheer Khan makes a very insightful point here. More often than not, customers and industry pundits are considering SOA for application integration, business process automation, or legacy modernization use cases only. I second Basheer's recommendation; packaged applications customers should strongly consider SOA as a pattern to build application extensions and customizations. Rather than customizing the business logic inside the application, it should be extended into the middleware/SOA layer. These extensions decouple the lifecycle of the application and the (many) customizations that customers build over the life-span of the application. This decoupling will greatly simplify application upgrades and help customers stay abreast with the latest, greatest releases of business applications. In fact, Aberdeen Group (in their research paper - Best Practices in Extending ERP) has reported that 57% of companies quote prohibitive costs of customization upgrade as the key reason to not running the current release of the packaged application.

I would highly recommend a white paper ("Application Upgrades and Service Oriented Architecture") authored by my colleague, Markus Zirn, that discusses the challenges in detail.

Firstly, apologies for not blogging for almost a month. I've been having way too much fun getting ready for the upcoming SOA Suite 11g and Fusion Middleware 11g launch. I've been part of a more than a handful of product launches at Oracle, but this one is, by far, the biggest in terms of scale; Oracle Fusion Middleware is now a multi-billion dollar business.

It's not very long before you will get to see how Oracle is ready to change the SOA, BPM and EDA landscape by providing a game changing, next generation business application platform. Don't forget to register for this grand launch here!

"The best companies use economic downturns as a time to innovate and make strategic investments," says Maneesh Joshi, a senior group manager, product marketing for SOA at Oracle. As evidence, Joshi cites a recent long-term study by analysts at McKinsey & Company called Managing IT in a Downturn. "In a downturn, conventional wisdom suggests cutting costs and reducing expenses while compromising on innovation," says Joshi. "But conventional wisdom is wrong."

The McKinsey & Company study, which tracked nearly a thousand industrial companies over 20 years, found that industry leaders and successful challengers increased spending on mergers and R&D during economic downturns. "These successful companies dialed up their volume on strategic spending during recessionary times," says Joshi. "They maintained their appetite for innovation and even dug into their cash reserves to act while others were not. They had a much greater chance of emerging successful and maintaining a leadership position or seizing it from competition during the successive expansionary period."

Innovate with SOA
According to Joshi, now is a great time to introduce or expand your service-oriented architecture. "SOA gives you a more flexible infrastructure that makes your business more agile today and adaptable to growth opportunities in the future."

A smart SOA road map, says Joshi, leverages quick returns on highly visible projects to free up budget and support for longer-term projects. "Prioritize your SOA road map," he advises. "Focus first on a small yet important process that is critical to your business or cash flows. Use SOA to fix this process that has high visibility and is infamous for its inefficiency," he adds. "By showing savings and benefits on a visible project, you can catch management's attention and use it to make the case to grow your SOA initiative. It is extremely important to pick a process that is manageable and improves your chances of success. You are going to get one chance and you certainly do not want to bite off more than you can chew."

Think Long Term
"Be sure to focus on short-term progress, like three months or six months out, but do not lose sight of longer term value and goals," says Joshi. "With SOA, you can generate savings and create incremental opportunities that far surpass what you would have achieved from cost reductions alone. The 20-year McKinsey & Company study makes it pretty clear that the big opportunity is right now."

Learn More
Learn how Oracle SOA Suite can help your company win in the short and long term
See how Australian Vintage inspires change by innovating with SOA (video)
Read the McKinsey & Company study, Managing IT in a Downturn

Note: This article was recently published in the May 2009 edition of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Newsletter. Many thanks to Jeff Erickson for authoring this article and Marti Bowman for her nifty edits while helping me put this article together.

Come watch leading executives share their insights for a successful SOA at this Executive Leadership Roundtable, a first of its kind live video webcast. This event has leading IT executives join Senior VP of Oracle, Amlan Debnath. The panelist will share their top 5 insights around

• Building a business case for SOA
• SOA adoption strategies
• Critical success factors
• Efficiency drivers & cost savings
• State of the SOA market

These executives will share how SOA in general, and Oracle SOA Suite in specific, has helped such diverse set of industries achieve significant business value. Learn what strategies have worked and what pitfalls to avoid while planning your SOA initiatives. Learn what makes one executive so successful in tracking a $20M budget within a narrow variance of 2-3%!

Register now, seats are limited!

The recent financial meltdown has exposed a lot of business leaders in the financial industry and their fatal flaws. Some pundits have gone as far as challenging the training grounds of these business leaders – the B-schools these leaders attended. There has been a lot of talk about reviewing (and even fixing) the way business school students are being trained today. Some are challenging the existing curriculum while others are suggesting beefing it up with additional courses on leadership and ethics.

Since I’m at the tail-end of my Executive MBA from The Wharton School here at their San Francisco Campus, a top b-school’s most current curriculum is still very fresh in my mind. I have some terrific experiences to share from the past two years as well and hence this blog post.

In context of this discussion, the course that springs to my mind is Total Leadership. This was a transformative course that I would strongly recommend to everyone! It doesn’t matter whether you are executive leading large organizations, an individual contributor, a professional athlete, or a homemaker; the principles of Total Leadership are equally applicable to each one of us. These fundamental principles proposed by Prof. Stew Friedman are eternal and can be applied in every aspect of our lives. It almost feels like when Stew wrote this book, he had picked up on this trend of leaders getting too narrow-focused and losing sight of what really matters.

The best thing you could do to get your crazy world under control would be to read the book today! I’d suggest that you look at the exercises as a great opportunity to introspect and focus on what really matters to you. When was the last time you did that?

While I’m not too thrilled that top b-schools are under attack, I’m extremely proud of the fact that Wharton has not shown up in most of the discussions. And, I attribute that to a very strong leadership at Wharton that has consciously maintained a balance between focus on revenue and social responsibility.

BE REAL, BE WHOLE, BE INNOVATIVE

My friend and colleague, Mike Stamback, had some really good comments on my previous blog post regarding the SOAP vs. REST decisions that enterprise architects face on a daily basis. His comments really got me thinking and rather than responding to his comment, I wrote up this blog. His verbatim comments were:

"Nice thoughts Maneesh. What's the practical impact of a hybrid approach though? Can SOAP-y and RESTful services coexist and interact with each other? It seems there might be some implications on transformation, translation, security, etc since these two patterns are different. Any thoughts on that?"

SOAP and REST have to co-exist and the decision to use either should entirely be use case driven - SOAP for secure, reliable interactions, REST for more light-weight interactions. Standardizing on one over the other is like taking the one-size-fits-all approach; and we know how ridiculous the one-size-fits-all idea was.

There are always going to be cases in hybrid environments where a business process needs to orchestrate across a variety of services, some SOAP-y and some REST-ful. This is where either the orchestration engine needs to have rich enough capabilities to handle both types of invocations or will have to go through an intermediary (service virtualization or mediation) that takes care of the necessary translations, transformation, and security as Mike has rightly pointed out. This validates Mike’s concern about having implications on transformation, translation, security etc. Which also means there’s going to be penalty one will have to pay for choosing to expose a service using one protocol over the other.

There really is no right or wrong answer here. Some of the considerations besides the functional needs (security, reliability) are:

- This is when one has to resort to the age old 80-20 rule to figure out which service is exposed over what protocol. What is the preference of 80% of the clients that are invoking this service? Would they prefer SOAP or REST?
- If one decides to go via an intermediary due to client-service mismatch, what are the maintenance and monitoring overhead costs of this extra moving part?
- Performance impact
(a) What is the impact on performance of the service provider because of the overhead of having to handle SOAP headers?
(b) What is the impact on performance of the client because of the overhead of having to handle SOAP headers?
(c) What is the performance impact due to the additional steps – serialization/de-serialization, translation, transformation, security policies etc. – introduced because of the intermediary?

Like everything else in life, it all boils down to what your priorities are – is it functionality? is it lower TCO? is it performance? or is it the requirements of your most important client? Sometimes you have to bend over backwards to keep your most important customer happy.

Couple of weeks ago, I got this wonderful opportunity to pick the brain of Ian Robertson, Director of Architecture, from Overstock.com. When asked about the 'SOA is dead' controversy, he brushed it aside confirming that SOA was indeed alive and kicking at Overstock.com. Overstock.com has done a phenomenal job of building a SOA-based enterprise where both IT and Business are working towards the singular goal of growing business, he added. The pragmatic approach of the IT architecture team towards solving business problems and staying away from ivory tower architectures has remained a key ingredient of its success. It is also important to not get too caught up in a single project/problem to lose sight of and jeopardize the long term goals of the business.

When I wanted to hear his thoughts on the REST vs. SOAP discussion, he said "All of Overstock.com's services within its firewall are REST-based; we don't use SOAP for our intra-firewall invocations. Our 3rd party partners, however, use a mix of SOAP and HTTPS protocols to access our public services. By using REST for our internal services, we are avoiding some of the overhead that the WS-* standards introduce."

IMHO, SOAP adds value when invocations are business critical where security, encryption, and reliability are of utmost importance – imagine the consequences of losing a $1M dollar PO. Other GET or POST type of interactions that are not business critical simply cannot justify the overhead that SOAP introduces and it is better to stick to REST to stay lean and mean. SOAP does have its own place, albeit in a reduced role.

Interestingly it was only earlier today that Dan Woods (JargonSpy of Forbes.com) touched upon the same topic of REST Vs. SOAP in his ‘A Simpler Path to SOA’ article. I agree with Ian, Dan, and Accenture CTO Don Rippert that it is time to give SOAP some REST. In fact, SOA itself has been consistently delivering on its promises through some serious heavy lifting (read SOAP) over the past few years and it certainly deserves an ease-off with a nice REST-ful, SOAP-y bubble bath.

BTW, I really enjoyed Ian's contributions at the "The Role of the Architect Roundtable" at ComputerWorld's Enterprise Architecture Virtual Conference. I would highly recommend it to anyone working in the today’s world of enterprise IT.

UPDATE: In my later blog post, SOAP or REST? it's about your priorities, I have discussed some of the implications of having a hybrid approach, and some of the important considerations while making these decisions.

Read this to find out why Oracle's SOA is alive and kicking...

I would now like to invite the SOA blogosphere to join Oracle in laying this controversy to rest. Goodbye Hype! Welcome Value!

In layman terms, productivity is defined as the quantity of output per dollar input. We have made some major strides in terms of productivity over the past 4 decades. Computer automation of previously manual processes has had a great deal to do with it. Right from taking care of daily chores such as watering your garden to automated payment of bills to automated expense reporting at work have left more and more time on our hands to innovate and improve upon other aspects of our lives.

While IT continues to automate business processes and improve enterprise productivity, IT’s own organizational productivity always seems to be under the microscope. Business leaders expect IT to get more out of less and continue to deliver on the promises while the supporting funds are shrinking. Here are some things to think about while planning your IT budget spend; the key is to put in less and getting more in every dimension of your organization.

1. Hardware + O/S – there is no question that this lowermost layer is a commodity today. As long as you make sure your business software is certified on this layer, you are good to go. The O/S decision most likely has already been made at the enterprise level, so not much wiggle room there. So, lowering the denominator by using cheaper hardware is one recommended way to improve your organization’s productivity.

2. Enterprise Software – this is one layer that you cannot make any compromises on. Your entire business depends on this layer being highly available – reliable, scalable, and flexible. Enterprise-grade quality in this layer is an absolute must-have. A decision to go with grid-enabled, standards-based products, such as a J2EE-based application server or a BPEL-based orchestration engine, which are tried and tested by thousands of customers, will give you the necessary peace of mind while helping your focus on solving the business problems you’ve been tasked to. Going for cheaper does not necessarily improve productivity – imagine hunting for a missing million dollar PO!

3. Human Capital – top talent is always expensive no matter what the economic conditions are. So, if you want to build a high-performance team, you are going to have to pay for it. However, you still have some control on this factor in terms of the skillset you seek and the toolset you give them to work with. Proprietary skillsets (COBOL, BusinessWorks) are always rarer and therefore more expensive; conversely, skillset for mature standards (XML, Java, BPEL) are more widely available and always cheaper to find. Additionally, more productive tools (design-time, governance, management & monitoring) can help deliver more value with shorter project cycles. Adhering to standards-based and using easy-to-use toolset will improve productivity by keeping your employment costs low and getting more out of your talent.

Even in this tough environment, IT leaders have several levers to work with and continue to deliver value to business, both to the top line by supporting innovation and the bottom-line by staying cost conscious.

On a side note, I’m glad that NetApp CIO Marina Levinson has recommended staying course on IT investments in this economic downturn – something that is in line with my previous post dated Feb 17th.

Everyone in the world of SOA is talking about cost control and efficiency improvements. Is this all SOA is about? In my humble opinion, SOA has a lot more to offer than just that. Innovation is the third and equally important pillar of SOA, and there is none better a time to innovate than an economic recession.

IT is increasingly becoming a critical element of business strategy. And as the strategy guru, Michael Porter, puts it, operational efficiency can never be sustainable over a longer period of time; there has to be more to strategy than just cost savings and improved efficiency. Innovation is the only way to build competitive advantage and keep competition at bay, irrespective of the economic conditions.

Economic recessions provide great opportunities for businesses to get inward-focused. Businesses are no longer tied down just keeping up with the ever-growing market demands; for once, the demand is steady (if you are lucky) or shrinking (hopefully not enough to run you out of business) and your IT resources are not overloaded. This is a great time to rationalize your IT assets and apply the core principles of SOA (loose-coupling, re-use) to your infrastructure. However, that may not suffice in the long-term success of your business, and I would recommend going a step further and encouraging innovation.

A case study by McKinsey and Company suggests that companies spending on innovation during recessionary periods have been able to maintain or wrestle leadership positions during the subsequent expansionary periods. You can find out more about this study from a recent presentation I made at the ebizQ’s SOA in Action Virtual Conference – Maximizing your IT budget in a down economy. In the same session, my colleague Mohan Udyavar, presented a case on how his client was able to cut costs and improve efficiencies while innovating business processes.

In my next blog, I will share my thoughts on ways to power innovation applying the fundamental principles of SOA even when on a limited budget.