Businesses should be able to begin their journey towards deploying service-oriented architecture (SOA) without having to incur the costs of system overhauls, says Tibco country manager, Marco Gerazounis.
Intelligent SOA deployments can help to "stop the IT industry's extortion", he notes.
"We take the approach that we will leverage what infrastructure you have, even if that is the mainframe, as was the case with Old Mutual, for instance," Gerazounis told delegates at the ITWeb SOA Executive Forum this week.
Another central issue, raised by vendors and customers alike at the event, is the importance of using open standards (such as those defined by the World Wide Web Consortium) in any SOA project, to avoid vendor lock-in and make it easier for companies to migrate and evolve solutions.
Standards
Tibco director of product marketing, Jeff Kristick, noted that adhering to open standards improves service interoperability.
"SOA is designed to break down monolithic applications into discreet, self-describing business functions called services," he stated.
Combining business process management, business optimisation and SOA can increase a company's operational efficiency and effectiveness; accelerate projects, initiatives and go-to-market cycles; and improve operational visibility, collaboration and pro-activeness - added Kristick.
"Many companies around the world are moving rapidly through the adoption phases," he points out.
Locally, Tibco's SOA customers include MTN, South African Airways, First National Bank, Mutual and Federal, Rand Merchant Bank, Dimension Data, Sun International and Old Mutual.
Time to maturity
BMI-TechKnowledge research manager, Roy Blume, noted the most common problems, when it comes to an SOA deployment, are reconciling the costs with the expected business value, and trying to organise data that is often hidden, fragmented and inconsistent.
"Added to this, an SOA deployment will often take so long to become effective that the business requirements for it have evolved by the time of maturity," he told attendees.
Some companies feel there would be limited application of SOA to their businesses, and some simply lack the knowledge, studies have revealed, Blume added.
However, he sees SOA as critical to a business. "It is the first time the term 'service' relates to business services, rather than IT services."
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