SDA: What is SOA, in your view? Has it evolved in depth and strength over the years and has it been a smooth transition?
Ram Menon: SOA is a long-term IT strategy designed to:
- Break down monolithic applications into discrete, self-describing business functions called ‘services’
- Leverage standards to improve service interoperability (not just Web services standards)
- Enable reuse of services that can be assembled into ‘composite’ applications to quickly satisfy new business requirements
It’s also important to note that SOA is not a single set of products, technologies or standards, since SOA spans technological and organizational boundaries. Hence, success requires leveraging best-of-breed approach to ensure the right technology has been proven and is designed to satisfy a particular task.
Although SOA is not a new concept – it takes its lessons from previous iterations of component-based develop more than a decade ago (e.g., CORBA) – although today SOA is enabling an unprecedented level of asset reuse. SOA has moved into the mainstream in recent years, driven mostly by the maturation of Web services and other related standards.
SDA: What in your view makes SOA such a sought-after approach in enterprise business? Do you believe it can stand its ground as ‘the next big thing’ or is it only a passing trend?
Ram Menon: Today companies are struggling to keep pace with the rate of constant change driven by the dynamics of their respective industries (one recent survey indicates that only 11% of executives say they're able to keep up with the business demands to change technology-enabled processes). Executives who are trying to stay ahead of their competition -- say by bringing to market some new product or service, or executing on a new marketing campaign designed to improve customer satisfaction, for example -- are often times frustrated with the fact they must wait (sometimes as long as 10-12 months) for their IT department to put into place the processes needed to support the new business initiative.
One primary benefit of SOA is to shorten time to market by accelerating the application development/deployment cycle through the reuse of existing IT assets instead of having to write, test and deploy new code. A number of TIBCO customers have found that SOA is accelerating their time to market by as much as 40 to 60%, with evidence in some cases as much as 75%. This means that what use to take 10-12 months to deploy the processes needed to support that new business initiative can now be done within a month or two. This has a profound impact on the ability of the business to capitalize on new market opportunities faster than their competitors, whereas without SOA it can represent a tremendous opportunity cost given the loss of potential revenue over the course of the additional 8-9 months needed to develop new applications from scratch.
SDA: While most companies are jumping into the SOA bandwagon, many complain that employing SOA infrastructure has only ruined their prospects. Are there any chinks in the SOA armor? What are the issues in the SOA area that still need resolving?
Ram Menon: Because SOA is much more of a application development paradigm than any set of products or technologies, it represents a way of doing things. Hence, the reasons for failure to successfully deploy an SOA most often are tied to the human factor. A number of TIBCO customers have cited the fact that even once they put into place the infrastructure needed to deploy and SOA, the extent of service reuse they immediately achieved was minimal. Often times it took more than a year before they started to see tangible benefits from reuse, which was the result of gaining a level of trust with their developers. After all, developers instinctively want to write code when building out some new business process. Great effort must be made to educate developers to first look for services they can reuse before writing code.
SDA: Recently, IBM, Oracle and others announced their new advances Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO). How far do you see these approaches influencing and/or augmenting the growth of SOA?
Ram Menon: TIBCO sees SCA as a key standard in the design and assembly of services within an SOA. We see the logical design model of SCA being coupled with a physical deployment model such as JBI (JSR208) to enable the next generation of composite applications that span multiple implementation technologies.
SDA: What are the issues organizations of different sizes must consider before opting for an SOA solution? Are there any supplementary services a customer must look out for?
Ram Menon: Another potential pitfall is to take too narrow of a view of SOA. Fact is, large enterprises often times have already had some SOA initiative underway, but the scope of that initiative is limited because it is too tactical or departmental. As a result the benefits they’ve seen have also been very limited. The true benefits of SOA cannot be fully realized until the SOA can be extended across the enterprise, and service reuse can be achieved beyond departmental boundaries. However, this is not a trivial task, and can only be achieved if an architecture team can be established with the charter of putting into place standards that enforced across various departments – in effect, an ‘SOA Center of Excellence’is seen as a best practice to ensure success.
In addition to software, services are almost always needed to help customers define and execute their SOA strategy. These services often include planning an SOA/integration approach, designing a reference architecture, identifying organizational issues, implementation and testing, etc. TIBCO has typically played the role of ‘trusted advisor’ in this area by bringing to customers many of the best practices and methodologies that have been captured as the result of thousands of successful customer deployments. Leveraging the experience of a team of senior architects, like those who are part of TIBCO’s Professional Services Group (PSG), is absolutely key to ensuring success.
SDA: How important is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in a company’s SOA infrastructure? Is an ESB built on open standards more effective/efficient?
Ram Menon: Clearly an ESB plays a critical role in an SOA. However, the concept of an ESB is nothing new, nor is it enough. When you look at the functional components of an ESB—transport, routing, transformation, orchestration, mediation, etc.—these are the same functional components of what a traditional integration broker was designed to do even before Web services standards had emerged. TIBCO BusinessWorks, for example, is a third-generation integration technology that was built from the ground-up using open standards (and not just Web services standards). BusinessWorks was launched in 2001, which pre-dates the emergence of the ESB paradigm, yet BusinessWorks performs all the capabilities of an ESB plus a whole lot more.
When you look at how ESBs have been deployed in the typical large enterprise, you’ll find they have been most often used to support tactical/departmental SOA initiatives. But as previously stated, the true benefits of SOA cannot be fully realized until the SOA can be extended beyond departmental boundaries.
SDA: What are the top five questions a customer must ask a vendor before choosing an SOA solution?
Ram Menon: The typical questions we get include:
1. How will the SOA technology help me address the heterogeneity that comes from running disparate application platforms (e.g., different vendors’ J2EE implementations, .NET, C/C++, mainframe, etc.)? How will it help extend reuse of these services across these different platforms?
2. Beyond support for Web services (e.g., SOAP, WSDL, HTTP), how will the solution help me wrap and expose all of my non-standards-based legacy assets as reusable services?
3. Which transport mechanisms and protocols does the solution support that will help me best scale the SOA for the distributed enterprise?
4. How does the solution support services governance and security?
5. Beyond the product features, does the vendor possess the expertise and proven track record to help me with my planning and implementation?
SDA: TIBCO recently joined the OpenAjax initiative and promised to share expertise to improve Eclipse ATF and Ajax interoperability. Can you elaborate? Also, what do you expect in return from this move?
Ram Menon: TIBCO brings a 5-year mature AJAX RIA solution to a 1 year old AJAX market. Gartner’s Ray Valdez will attest that GI is the most mature AJAX solution in market today for delivering apps that look, feel and perform like desktop GUIs. TIBCO as it has with other standards bodies like JMS for example, is again leading in defining interoperability standards for AJAX to bring strong benefits to TIBCO customers who want to use TIBCO award winning General Interface product (named by InfoWorld as “best ajax toolkit of 2006”) but also want the ability to leverage components from open source and other 3rd parties.
Standards help create a 3rd party ecosystem around the core infrastructure much in the way that the JSR-168 portlet standard has done. TIBCO helps its customer stay ahead by being a leading participant in the development of interoperability standards. With out roots as an integration company, people look to TIBCO to make disparate things work together. TIBCO is a recognized leader in the area of messaging, integration and SOA. Leading in presentation-tier technologies that compliment messaging and SOA infrastructures makes perfect sense and brings more value to our customers. At JavaOne we demonstrated an “ajax 3-way” running GI, dojo, and Yahoo! components simultaneously atop GI’s foundational AJAX services.
SDA: What is the scope for the adoption of SOA infrastructure in Asia? Do you see a potential in the Asian market? Also tell us about the market drivers and the growth potential for SOA in Asia?
Ram Menon: Any medium to large enterprise in the Asia-Pacific region that must deal with issues such as the rising cost of IT and the inability to meet the rapidly changing demands of the business is a potential SOA opportunity. In fact, 47 of the 100 largest companies in the world look to TIBCO to help them manage their mission-critical systems – most of these companies have an Asian presence and either have deployed, or are in the midst of executing, an SOA initiative. Besides improved IT efficiency and greater adaptability, typical drivers for SOA include the ability to resolve significant business issues such as corporate and regulatory compliance.
SDA: What is TIBCO's strategy for the Asian, specifically Indian markets? Can you tell us about opportunities and roadblocks that SOA players may face in India/Asia?
Ram Menon: Most of our customers in the Asia-Pacific region (about 20% of TIBCO’s 2,500 customer base) originally purchased TIBCO products to put into place the messaging infrastructure needed to support their real-time business and/or to execute common EAI scenarios (e.g., synchronizing disparate applications and data repositories). Some of these customers are now looking to define and execute an SOA strategy, and are rationalizing their infrastructure portfolios to determine which existing technologies can be leveraged and which additional products must be purchased. Newer customers also need help with their SOA strategies.
Many of our Asia-Pacific customers are just now getting acquainted with the compelling benefits SOA has to offer. TIBCO is helping these customers get started with their SOA implementations by making available educational programs that leverage the experience and best practices of some of TIBCO’s most senior SOA practitioners and architects. This includes a monthly SOA webinar series, as well as the SOA Resource Center (http://www.tibco.com/solutions/soa/resourcecenter.jsp), which contains a library of technical whitepapers and other artifacts.
SDA: What are the latest trends in the SOA area to watch out for? Can you predict the road that SOA development will take in the next five years?
Ram Menon: A typical SOA application will be implemented across many development technologies including process definitions based on WSBPEL, existing J2EE and .NET components, services residing in packaged applications and new services built in Axis-Java environments. In addition scripting environments which provide rapid development capabilities will start to see a resurgence as mechanisms for developing services. The combination of SCA and JBI will provide a powerful standardized environment that spans the complete lifecycle of services (across design and execution) within the SOA environment.
This interview was originally published in Volume 10 of SDA Magazine
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