Although the term service-oriented architecture (SOA) has fallen out of the everyday IT lexicon and been replaced by the more on-trend buzzwords of cloud computing, big data, mobile-first and the social enterprise, the reality is these new technologies are driving the need for a more sophisticated form of SOA.
So says Saurabh Kumar, MD of In2IT Technologies SA, who notes taking an SOA-based approach to the fundamental underlying infrastructure assets is more crucial today than it was a decade ago.
According to WinterGreen Research, the SOA market size, at $5.7 billion in 2013, is anticipated to reach $16.4 billion by 2020.
The research firm notes significant growth is driven by smartphone and social media uptake. SOA delivers more efficient automated process and enables IT to spend a higher proportion of budgets on growing the business.
SOA is the foundation for modern transactional systems, says WinterGreen Research, adding as the Internet extends transaction systems to real-time, SOA has been invented to extend the transaction systems appropriately.
In the next decade, WinterGreen Research believes the same SOA principles will be at the core of a new era of business engagements that transact at Internet scale across locations, devices, people, processes and information.
It lists IBM, Oracle, Tibco, Fujitsu, Microsoft, SAP and Software AG as the top vendors in the SOA space.
"SOA allows enterprises to swiftly bring in new technologies and applications," Kumar says. "It means they can cater for changing customer demands and play in increasingly competitive markets, while at the same time leveraging existing legacy and mainframe infrastructure. This is done primarily by middleware SOA, and more specifically, an enterprise services bus (ESB)."
For example, he explains, with a bank's loan processing function, the entire fulfilment cycle may touch dozens of different applications, some legacy, and some new. The ESB unifies all of these into a single environment that the chief information officer can manage, optimise and evolve, he notes.
"The ESB sits at the heart of the architecture in any organisation that relies on legacy assets, but also needs to integrate new systems."
He believes it becomes important to start the SOA journey with a portfolio optimisation exercise to arrive at a thorough understanding of the existing legacy infrastructure and a clear vision of what new infrastructure the organisation aspires to in the short-, medium- and long-term.
According to Kumar, SOA should not be seen as another cost centre, which is often the perception. "In fact, what it actually does is optimise the investments you've already made, allows you to move with more agility and respond to market changes, and to better integrate with other systems outside the organisation.
A good example of this would be the bank that effectively uses SOA to integrate with courier companies - automating the process between customers who request bank cards, and the delivery of those cards to the right place, and at the right time, says Kumar.
"The dangerous result of seeing SOA simply as an IT cost is that organisations become tempted into buying 'off the shelf' software that does not achieve the desired results. The basic fundamental of SOA is that it is innate to your organisation, so development needs to be tailored.
"Technology names and the terms may be shifting in different directions; however, as the world of business changes, SOA is more important today than ever before and can provide an organisation with a wealth of benefits, including the competitive-edge required in today's business arena," he concludes.
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