Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Systems

An Integrated Technology Framework

The appeal of SOA is undeniable and when you have an integrated organization, it can easily supply the foundation for a wide array of business benefits, including: component reuse, effective process automation and accelerated time to market (by enabling enterprises to match software to business processes), enhancing agility in IT operations, and business strategy.

What’s easy to overlook is the need for process integrity in an SOA environment in which applications often extend beyond the enterprise to connect to partner and customer applications across the supply chain. Process integrity guarantees the kind of reliable, secure, and efficient environment that promises to support greater business agility, ultimately leading to the kind of customer loyalty that will produce the biggest dividends.

Business Benefits

SOA goes beyond the common concept of web services and provides an enterprise infrastructure and approach to achieve better business results.

With a SOA system you can:

• Innovate – SOA systems enables you to deploy innovative solutions that take advantage of existing systems.
• Extend and automate – SOA allows you to model and automate the terms of a business relationship, so you can seamlessly extend business models and value chains with optimum speed and transparency.
• Quickly adapt business processes – SOA systems enables you to separate the interface and process definition from the underlying application, resulting in faster implementations and more cost-effective upgrades, without any interruption to your users.
• Attract new customers – SOA allows you to take advantage of web services to deliver core competencies to new customer – while reducing IT costs and increasing efficiency.

Sample / Reference Architecture

Interface Management

At the top of the stack is Interface Management. Using a combination of Sun Java Adaptors, Intelligent Connectors, Third Party Interfaces and Open Standards, a layer of technologies is managed for the purpose of system connectivity. This is where we make decisions of SOAP vs. REST or HTTP vs. direct JMS or even niches like WCF (Windows Communication Framework) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

Process Execution

This layer is the most visible and thus notably lacking when absent. If the ESB (enterprise service bus) is to enable business processes by creating, composing, exposing and consuming them, then the Process Execution layer is critical. Primarily, this tier facilitates the creation and composition of processes, in addition to actually running them. Exposing and consuming business processes are the functions of the tiers above and below this one. A well-implemented layer here can mean true BPM (Business Process Management), BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), OPI (Operational Intelligence) and meaningful CEP (Complex Event Processing).

** Enterprise Service Layer **

The Enterprise Service Layer (ESL) stack is an Oshyn methodology for driving value from the ESB and SOA as whole. This tier describes how to compose services to expose business processes, business functions, data access as well as where to fit in the event driven framework and enterprise gateway to further isolate and abstract end systems. It is via the ESL where critical features are incorporated such: Identity Management, Policy and Security Governance as well as key infrastructure support.

Enterprise Message Broker/Bus

The fourth layer is essential to the messaging of the bus in the ESB architecture. This facilitates both synchronous (request/reply) and asynchronous (pub/sub) management of the Integration Architecture to leverage both MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) as well as EDA (Event Driven Architecture). Together with the error handling in the Process Execution Tier and the Support Services in the ESL, a highly available (three to five 9’s ) highly scalable and highly performing integration fabric is achievable.

CDM Management

The Canonical Data Model is the backbone for all data access, message brokering, event processing and business process exchange as it represents the Core Business Data. Together with MDM (Master Data Management) and semantic mapping, CDM data can be aggregated and pulled when needed without requiring redundant and bloated requests. Plugging in ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) to this tier will provide for powerful BI (Business Intelligence), data warehousing / mining or operational data stores.