Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a remarkable evolutionary step in technology’s march toward one of its greatest unfulfilled goals: the ability to connect a wide variety of systems without proprietary software in order to achieve truly open interoperability.
At its core, SOA is a simple affair. Imagine two software programs that were written in different languages running on different operating systems. It has always been possible to establish a connection between two such programs using custom or proprietary code, but this approach has proven to be both costly and inefficient. Web services, which form the underpinning of SOA, have made it possible to create an operating connection between two pieces of software using a new common language known as XML. This is the promise of SOA.
For some, SOA is a great advance in computing. For others, it is the latest come-on from an industry that has seen its share of dark moments in the last decade. Whichever you believe, the reality is that SOA is happening. If you work in any sizable business, government, or nonprofit entity, you can be sure that SOA planning is underway in your workplace.
This book gives you, the business professional, the tools to make sense of both the corporate and technology issues involved in realizing return on investment from an enterprise SOA. This is a challenging proposition but, if done correctly, entirely possible. The tech world is abuzz with SOA-related conjecture, overeager vendors, ambiguous alliances, overblown paradigms, and a lot of hype. Some of it, I must confess, I’ve spun myself over the years. I am a vendor. I’m here to evangelize, a little, but also to caution you about the sensible, businesslike way to approach SOA. My goal is to help you confidently assess the best SOA options for your organization. SOA requires you to orient yourself quickly amid a great deal of market noise. I ought to know: This is my second time in a similar situation.
In 1999, I traveled the world on an IPO road show with a message heralding the exponential curve of Internet technology adoption in corporations and governments. The global imagination was running wild with the many implications of network standards coming of age. Every major newspaper, magazine, and television show took notice—the world was changing and apparently for the better!
Within months of the IPO, the company I had founded had achieved a market cap of more than $1.5 billion. The age of “Internet standards”—the common lingua franca of instantaneous global communication—had arrived. With the universal adoption of TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, and web browsers, a set of standards was embraced that laid the foundation for a new era in computing. The result could only be unprecedented efficiency for business, education, health care, and government. The prospects were dazzling, and we had only explored the tip of the iceberg.
One year later, the tide turned. Enthusiasm for the explosive power of network technology reversed with the same ferocity that had fueled it months before. The new common wisdom was: The Internet was a fad, the benefits illusory; the analysts, entrepreneurs, engineers, venture capitalists, and financial markets were insane The NASDAQ collapsed and continued to sink over the next three years so precipitously that every tenet of the initial promise fell into question. The counter reaction of the market was so severe that the Internet technologies seemed not only to be forgotten, but suspect at the core. Rather than weed out overvalued stocks, poor business plans, inexperienced executives, or immature technologies, the market condemned everything.
Clearly, there was merit in bringing the market back to earth. Valuations were high and rounds of venture capital funding, rather than business models, were sustaining many poorly conceived companies. But had the “irrational exuberance” been wholly irrational? The answer will surprise many: the initial optimism was justified. In fact, the potential had been understated. As we will explore in this book, the fruition of the Internet’s promise is coming and the resulting value creation will dwarf even the boldest estimates of the past.
The power of network technology manifests in three distinct forms of connectivity: person-to-person, person-to-computer, and computer-to-computer, and each of these carries a myriad of cultural and economic implications. It is the third form of communication, computer-to-computer, that I will explore in this book. It is not only the least developed so far, but also the most valuable and essential.
Enabling electronic person-to-person communication via e-mail has become a staple of our consumer and business world. It seems inconceivable that just a decade ago this capability was relegated to a select few. Seemingly second nature in our lives, e-mail is a recent innovation based entirely on network standards. It was not immediately obvious that it would be possible to get a message from one person to another, without a direct line between them, without knowing what kind of client software they might have, or what kind of computer they might be using. By building on the same standards, providers of e-mail software and services have thrived on the basis of full interoperability. You can e-mail anyone anywhere in the world without knowing the recipient’s geographic location or computer platform, and your message will arrive and become available within seconds.
Similarly, Internet standards ushered in another great shift in computing capability—the transition from client/server to browser-based applications. This enabled the utilization of software over a network without specific code on the user’s side of the conversation. Within a few years, the World Wide Web linked hundreds of millions of computers and applications via browser-based interfaces, providing hundreds of millions of remote transactions throughout the world, none of which involves a mandate for specialized software to enable interaction. Again, it was only a decade ago that this capability was nothing more than a novelty to a select group of early adopters, scientists, and inventors. Today, the world is fundamentally different as citizens of countries in every part of the globe are empowered by access to the collective knowledge base of the human race.
The staggering implications of these technologies can be traced to one core principle: network standards. E-mail can be sent and delivered to any e-mail recipient across providers, computers, devices, and so forth, because everyone has adopted the same language of communication. Websites can be viewed by anyone with any standard browser for the same reason. It would not be in any business’s interest (be it IBM, Microsoft, or the U.S. government) to push their own standards into this mix, for in so doing they would only be harming their own capabilities to leverage the power of interoperability. If Acme E-mail Company generated e-mails that could only be read by other Acme E-mail Company users, this company would quickly become irrelevant. In a spectacular cycle of enlightened self-interest, every major company in the world has built on top of standards which have ushered a potentially exponential release of value from investments in information technology.
If we take this trend to the next level of execution, we soon arrive at the ultimate fruition of the promise of these standards: application-to-application interoperability. The value of software in a networked economy will grow in direct proportion to how well it interoperates with other software via standards. As we will see in this book, this same principle applies not just to how software is built but also to how companies and governments build efficient processes in order to compete.
Open interoperability is the mother lode of potential value in information technology. While e-mail and browser-based applications are significant, the view that these technologies would change the face of business was the most misunderstood concept of the bubble era, leaving confused executives and investors scrambling to understand how or when a website would affect their business in some mysterious, profound manner. The unrealized promise came not from falling short in these aspirations (they’re delivering plenty) but from the immaturity of the standards in the area of computer-to-computer communication.
As “application” interoperability standards mature, the mystery is resolved—for it is in this equation that the heralded benefits are revealed. Organizations that take advantage of this evolution in computing will compete and those that do not will find themselves in the same position as the Acme E-mail Company: relegated to a stiflingly small world while competitors around them thrive in the next era of global, hyper-efficient networked computing. This is the power of the service-oriented architecture.
To understand enterprise SOA, you must get the full technological and political flavor of what can happen when a large organization makes a commitment to this exciting but challenging new technology. That is the goal of this book in presenting the case study of Titan Insurance, a large company grappling with many real-world issues that come up when open standards are introduced into a complex environment.
Eric Pulier