What you don't know about SOAs could hurt your business
By Sidney Hill, Jr., executive editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
A service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be a vehicle for turning information technology (IT) into a strategic business weapon. However, few manufacturers know how to exploit this architecture, and not enough IT vendors are offering sufficient practical advice to get companies started.
That seemed to be the general feeling among industry experts in attendance at a recent forum on the use of SOAs among small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). Progress Software, a supplier of IT infrastructure products used heavily by that market, hosted the forum in conjunction with its annual user conference.
The primary question posed to panelists—which included analysts, application developers, and IT users—was, what would it take for SMBs to embrace the SOA concept on a large scale?
"The first thing vendors need to do is stop talking about SOA in technical terms," claims Navi Radjou, a VP with Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass. "Call it a business process orchestration platform or something that more accurately describes its potential value."
Kalman Tiboldi is the information and communications technology manager at TVH, a Belgian company that supplies forklifts and accessories to more than 17,000 wholesalers and distributors in 160 countries. He says an SOA helped TVH double revenues over the past four years, primarily by giving the company the flexibility to constantly adopt new customer service processes. Tiboldi says while choosing the right tools for building an SOA is important, users need to understand that a successful SOA deployment requires doing more than installing technology.
"An SOA is more than a technology architecture," says Tiboldi. "It is a methodology for blending IT with business processes, and it is the first time this actually has happened."
Fundamentally, an SOA is an infrastructure wherein software applications are broken into modular components—called services—and placed in a repository where they can be accessed either by users or other services. When this is done properly, a company can implement new business processes almost at will by writing procedures that call for sets of services to interact with one another.
Web services not required
A real-time pricing function was the first SOA-based business process adopted by TVH. "With this functionality, we don't have to work with fixed prices," Tiboldi says. "We can give customers the best possible price at the moment they place an order."
The process involves pulling information from a number of applications—including one that tracks current market prices for the various products TVH sells—and then calculating a price for the customer placing the order.
Interest in SOAs has increased recently with the advent of Web services. These are software components wrapped in communications protocols that make it easier for them to be shared by companies doing business over the Internet. Much of the confusion surrounding SOAs stems from a common misconception that they can only be built with Web services.
TVH actually started building its SOA in the late 1990s, long before anyone had heard of Web services. It started by breaking down components from its enterprise applications into small modules that could be placed on a separate application server and connected, via a message queuing system, to create new business processes.
The impetus for this, Tiboldi says, was growing desire among TVH customers to purchase products over the Internet. "Ultimately, we wanted to be a one-stop shop, where customers could come and buy anything they needed associated with a forklift," Tiboldi says. TVH soon realized the SOA's potential for supporting real-time business processes, like the pricing calculator.
The IT staff used tools from Progress Software—specifically its Progress 4GL programming language—to write that program, which is one of a number of application modules now residing in a "services library," ready to be called on for use in other business processes. Tiboldi says those services are tapped regularly because TVH has given users free rein to submit requests for new processes they believe will improve business performance.
"We easily get more than 1,200 requests a year," Tiboldi says, adding that there is a formal process—headed by the business units—for determining which of those requests actually get turned into new processes.
As the TVH SOA has grown, so has its reliance on Progress technology. A Progress OpenEdge database and application server, along with a
SonicMQ messaging system and enterprise services bus, form the core components of the TVH SOA. Recently, TVH has begun wrapping its application components in Web services protocols, making them easier to use in B2B processes.
In its current form, this SOA, among other things, gives TVH four methods of conducting B2B transactions with its customers (see table). But Tiboldi says the most valuable feature is its ability to transform ideas generated by TVH employees into actual business processes.
"Typically, what separates one company from another in the marketplace is the creativity of its people," he says. "The SOA lets us use IT to turn our businesspeople's creativity into a competitive edge."
