Re-thinking IT and software development

In any discussion about software development it soon becomes clear there has been a shift away from technology to business as the major driver for the industry. Business is demanding greater cost-effectiveness and competitive advantage through flexibility, agility and speed. Software developers are responding to these demands in ways that are increasingly service-oriented, with a view to delivering business information to a variety of devices in real-time.

Almost without exception, industry players agree with the Gartner research group that a service-oriented architecture (SOA) will be the guiding principle of software development in the next 10 years because it advances the concepts of component-based architecture and incorporates the benefits of object-oriented programming design.

It is also widely acknowledged that although the Web services paradigm is not the only delivery mechanism for an SOA, of all technologies it is the bridging standard most likely to become dominant.

A shift in power to consumers is the most significant change to have affected the software industry recently. In the past 40 years, IT consumers have become more educated, and consequently more demanding.

Web services has made it possible to model the business world more closely.

Danny Naidoo, developer and platforms group director, Microsoft SA

"From being strongly product focused in the 1980s, the industry is now more business-oriented," affirms Arjen Wiersma, BMC software business development manager. "Increasingly, software development and IT services will be based on meeting end-user expectations."

Roy Hobson, Oakwell Solutions MD, says software development skills have become more of a commodity. "Business is definitely pressuring software developers, making it more important than ever to focus on quality and adapt quickly to changing business requirements."

Rainer Gaier, Ovations business solution company MD, says understanding the business drivers has become key. "Where business dictates, infrastructures tend to be service-oriented, which is a strong indication SOA is likely to be the way we are going in future."

Another indication of the growing importance of SOAs is increased demand for greater alignment between what IT delivers and what business requires. "The inherent flexibility of the SOA is a key to facilitating alignment between applications and business processes," says Dave Macdonald, PeopleSoft solution consulting manager.

The general expectation is that the drive to SOAs will lead to a closer bond between business and IT, allowing IT to become a true business enabler. In other words, business will become a consumer of services offered by IT.

But what, exactly, is an SOA?

An SOA may be defined as a way of designing a software system and its surrounding environment to provide services to end-user applications, to executable business processes, or to other services through published and discoverable service interfaces.

"SOA is a mechanism for integrating software components on dissimilar platforms and supports re-use of software components," says Michael Barnard, executive business developer in Business Connexion`s business integration centre.

If SOA defines how two computing entities interact to enable one entity to perform a unit of work on behalf of another entity, a "service" is that unit of work done to achieve results desired by the consumer of that service.

It is not difficult to see why SOA has emerged as the most likely design philosophy to enable software developers to meet demands of business, considering the benefits as defined in a recently published guide for a developer readiness program run by software development house Barone, Budge and Dominick (BB&D).

According to the guide, encapsulation of complexity ensures complexity is hidden from the consumer of services. Mobility of code means components of services can reside on any machine anywhere in the world. Because an SOA results in multi-layered applications, services appear to client programmers as components that use familiar terms and concepts as well as enabling development teams to work independently and in parallel.

The services definition supports multiple client types, meaning services and clients can be written in any language and deployed on any platform. This services approach also means different parts of the final application that need different security measures can be deployed behind appropriate types of firewalls, integration problems are reduced to a minimum, and service components can be re-used by other components or services.

While SOA is acknowledged as the most likely architecture for coming years, it is not a new concept. "SOA has been embraced by BB&D for years," says company director Ralf Dominick. "Many of the systems we have developed in the past 20 years have been built on an SOA basis."

Mohamed Cassoojee, Oracle SA country sales consulting manager, agrees future software development will be around SOA because it provides a common platform that can talk across different platforms, architectures and software. "Even proprietary technology can be accessed via SOA," he adds.

Application integration is at the heart of SOAs, and consequently some discussion must be devoted to middleware. Although there are wide-ranging definitions of the concept, there is some agreement around middleware as the system transport layer.

The differences in opinion concern the form this transport layer is likely to take and its importance in future SOAs. While some argue middleware will become gradually less important, or even obsolete, with a decline in pure proprietary technology and the evolution of a standards-based SOA, others say this is true only for new solutions designed around an SOA from inception. "Middleware will always be necessary as long as there is legacy software and hardware in an organisation," says George Smalberger, Ovations marketing director.

Migal van As, CEO of Intervate, a software development company, says middleware is a good short-term integration solution, but organisations should rather opt for a service-oriented infrastructure as soon as possible. "Middleware often leads to further integration and maintenance problems and SOA`s enablement of integration into other systems means there should be very good reasons for not using a service-oriented approach to development."

Danny Naidoo, developer and platforms group director for Microsoft SA, takes a slightly different view, seeing middleware more in terms of service management. In this context, Naidoo says middleware is likely to become more prevalent in enterprise applications and more intelligent. "A lot of the orchestration across enterprise infrastructures will probably hinge on feedback from the middleware layer."

Naidoo`s approach relates to Gartner`s prediction that event management technology will reshape the way businesses run as enterprises strive to achieve new levels of flexibility and a deeper understanding of their business processes. Gartner says message-oriented middleware is the likely enabler of the simplest level of event management. "In this role, middleware is telling some kind of operations manager what needs to be processed next," explains Naidoo.

Another view, balancing Naidoo`s contention that middleware will not decline with the view of it as a transport layer, holds that middleware will evolve into an enterprise services bus, or virtual conduit, to enable the interaction of services.

Enabling technologies may be approaching maturity, but IT has to transform itself to act more like a service provider and become like a business within the organisational context.

Wilhelm Hamman, business technologist, Computer Associates

BB&D`s developer guide says this enterprise services bus provides a standard protocol for communications and may include the developing industry standards for the interaction of services known as Web services (WS). This is consistent with the IBM view that WS is merely a technology in the SOA discussion. However, Shane Radford, IBM SA`s middleware business development manager, echoes another widely held view that WS is the most likely standard to realise SOA unless a rival new technology emerges.

WS has demonstrated the ability to make the technology landscape seamless. "By making technology seamless and aligned to the business process world, we can start to interpret those business processes more generically. That generic understanding will help in the development of an intelligent event model," says Naidoo, highlighting another prediction by Gartner that future software infrastructures will be event-driven. "WS has made it possible, for the first time, to model the business world more closely with software components and bypass traditional computing boundaries."

Radford`s bet in terms of software development is that one of the next big things will be composite applications (CAs), probably enabled by WS in the longer term. A CA is built by combining multiple business components or services, consisting of functionality drawn from several different sources within an SOA. Radford predicts CAs of the future will comprise high-level, coarse-grained components that have been orchestrated using a process management, workflow-type tool.

Software like CAs, which combines elements of a business activity in a single co-ordinated application and user interface, is similar to another concept Gartner refers to as the smart enterprise suite (SES). Gartner says vendors, in an attempt offer more flexibility, are combining the functionality of portals, collaboration, business process management, content and document management, and analytics to create a single, integrated platform. "The SES foundation allows business to develop a variety of solutions using a single platform, while providing facilities to integrate almost any external, third-party application into its architecture," explains Victoria Vaksman, Tilos Business Solutions MD.

As one of the major software development houses involved in developing WS, Microsoft is strongly promoting the standard along with its key .Net services development framework.

Sun Microsystems, however, is following a more neutral approach. "Sun is basing its SOA strategy not only on Web services standards, but also on established Web computing standards like Web, mail and file transfer protocols as certain proprietary applications make use of traditional standards but not necessarily Web services standards," says Sean O`Hare, technology architect at Sun Microsystems SA. "Remember, .Net deployments are specific to the Microsoft environment, but not everything in the enterprise world runs on a Microsoft platform."

Naidoo admits that adoption of SOAs based on WS has been disappointingly slow. "Many enterprises are migrating to .Net and understand the potential of leveraging legacy applications, but few are building SOAs because of uncertainty about how to begin doing that."

Naidoo says Microsoft expects the status quo to change as organisations realise they are unable to enjoy the business benefits WS delivers, such as highly sought-after real-time software infrastructures.

To take an extremely simplified view, it could be said that WS appears the most likely way of realising an SOA in the short- to medium-term. However, the ultimate goal business is driving towards through support of these concepts is the achievement of a real-time infrastructure (RTI) to deliver the ultimate business value in terms of agility, responsiveness, flexibility and quality of service.

An RTI embodies the idea of being able to extend resources globally across organisational boundaries and respond to demands in real-time. It is therefore not difficult to see the link between RTI and SOA.

Given the powerful drivers towards achieving RTI, Gartner sees it as inevitable, predicting RTI will reshape IT operations and infrastructure in the next 10 years.

Gartner says RTI business policies and service-level agreements drive dynamic and automatic optimisation of the IT infrastructure. It is in pursuit of RTI that business has begun to turn its attention to business process and service management technologies in recent times.

"Real-time infrastructure demands a clear understanding of the role of people using the infrastructure and the implications of services being unavailable," says BMC`s Wiersma.

It is in the achievement of RTI that the management role mooted by some for middleware in the SOA context is likely to become most relevant. Gartner recommends that RTI principles of standardisation, virtualisation and automation, already enshrined in business service management (BSM) and business process management (BPM), should be deployed for immediate benefit in preparation for RTI.

Another RTI-related concept that has emerged in recent times is that of grid infrastructures. "Grid infrastructure will be one element of an RTI, especially if you are talking about commercial organisations wanting to leverage existing processing power," says Naidoo. However, he says it is unlikely to extend beyond the boundaries of organisations because of the competitive nature of commercial enterprises.

In addition to political issues, RTI brings with it security issues, especially if, as Gartner predicts, service-oriented approaches push application providers to crack open their monoliths and allow access to internal business processes.

Most industry representatives agree that security requirements will make serious demands on software developers. Most also agree with Gartner`s prediction that future software infrastructures will be firewalled down to the application level. "We are not too far away from that already," says Naidoo. "If the industry adopts WS, wrapping individual interactions within a security wrapper will become more prevalent in the next three to seven years."

In the meantime, Gartner recommends that security considerations be addressed by taking advantage of technologies such as Kerberos, which O`Hare says provides the ability to authenticate a user to a service and a service to a user. "Security needs to go both ways, unlike traditional role-based security systems." He says security concerns have led business and technology companies in the Liberty Alliance to develop a federated identity framework to enable businesses to share internal business processes securely.

Achieving technology standards in terms of communication, interaction and security appears to be key to establishing SOAs, which in turn are key to realising the ideal of RTI. However, Wilhelm Hamman, business technologist at Computer Associates, emphasises that a common approach is required within business as well as IT. Hamman says even Gartner is too technology-focused in its analysis and ignores the need for a complete shake-up in business management, particularly within IT departments.

"Enabling technologies may be approaching maturity, but IT has to transform itself to act more like a service provider and become like a business within the organisational context," says Hamman. "We need more business-focused people in IT who will promote the acceptance of service-based standards like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and establish business-focused strategies for application development, security and WS."

Hamman says the solution lies in a change in IT management. "Not only in SA, but throughout the world. IT needs a new generation of management to enforce consistent standards and simplify operations. My ideal is IT as a service-focused business organisation capable of aligning software, hardware, application development and security."

In the final analysis, there appears to be industry-wide belief in the potential of SOA and WS in achieving the Holy Grail of RTI, but most believe there is much to be done before the way is clear to reaching that ideal.

While RTI appears inevitable in some ways, it is more likely that SOAs and eventually RTIs will be achieved in low-risk areas of business and within single departments or smaller organisations long before they extend to larger enterprises or across organisational boundaries. Many industry representatives agree with Gartner that achieving RTI is likely to be a decade-long journey. Others say that, given the rate of change in technology, it is really impossible to predict where things will be in 10 years` time.

Given the uncertainty of the future, BB&D`s Dominick advises that business principles should inform all software development strategies. "The key to success is focusing on providing a measurable return on investment today, not promises of future returns on investment. IT has to meet the same business imperatives as everything else, and providing measurable ROI is what it`s ultimately all about."