Service Oriented Architecture

Feature Article by Francis Juliano of Wine.com

As the cosmetology of the global business market changes, IT is increasingly challenged. They not only must maintain large legacy systems, they must also be nimble and quickly develop and deploy solutions that allow the business to take advantage of new business opportunities or even more modestly, just support rapid growth.

The challenge in the technology space is to understand how to manage the high rate of change (the “bleeding edge”) and where appropriate, intelligently integrate these new systems, methodologies or applications. It is not enough for IT to simply implement the next “coolest” technology, they must pay attention to corporate objectives and budgets and implement the best technology for the best price. Failure to do so can cause a company to run into the red as a result. Many industries must also manage to strict Federal and State laws. This can add additional cost as it may force IT to develop custom solutions or implement tighter controls.

Einstein stated that “Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Others have stated it not so eloquently as the KISS or “keep-it-simple-stupid” approach. The IT industry is routinely flooded with systems that are either too simple and unscalable or too complex and costly to maintain. How many times have you heard about a company that had a highly complex system and had to hire the original development company and pay them twice as much as their original R&D budget to customize it to your business needs?

Thankfully, e-commerce technology has come a long way. With the advent of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) highly scalable and maintainable systems can be implemented in an affordable way. SOA is an architectural construct whose goal is to achieve loose coupling amongst interacting software agents. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. Both provider and consumer are roles played by software agents on behalf of their owners.

When designing a solution, the goal is to identify the real dependencies (such a need to do accounting) and the artificial dependencies (today, we use company x’s product with AP and AR and connect via their API to our homegrown inventory system).

A real dependency is one that will always exist and cannot be simplified or reduced. An artificial dependency exists in this example of using a third party solution, but we can reduce the dependency through design so that we are not reliant on the third party software and have the capability to change to another product without needing to touch/modify all of the other applications that are part of the system. The key advantages are:

• Highly scalable architecture
• Simplification of interoperability
• Allows for services re-use
• Improves ability to respond quickly to change
• Less interdependencies so you are not locked into any vendors solutions

In short, SOA is helping IT organizations better manage and maintain their e-commerce architectures. IT can respond more quickly to business requirements helping their company to better achieve competitive advantage.