Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) will provide greater flexibility for those utilizing them, but will also bring greater issues for data and functional connectivity. This paper contrasts and compares the capabilities of a point-to-point and an enterprise service bus approach.
September 2006BUSINESS INSIGHTS Contacts: Connectivity and SOA Clive Longbottom Embracing Old Assets, Furthering the New Quocirca Ltd Tel +44 118 948 3360 Executive Summary Clive.longbottom@quocirca.com Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) will provide greater flexibility for those utilising them, but will also bring greater issues for data and functional Elaine Axby Quocirca Ltd connectivity. This paper contrasts and compares the capabilities of a point-Tel +44 20 8874 7442 to-point and an enterprise service bus approach. Elaine.axby@quocirca.com Main Findings . Current trends in technology are leading to application decomposition As adoption of Web Services increases, traditional applications (e.g. ERP, CRM) are being seen as too siloed in their approach to the business needs. . The move to SOA will drive connectivity needs The move to a more services-led approach will drive the need for the adaptors at an exponential rate. With services providing discrete functions, a single process may well involve the need for hundreds of these to interoperate and exchange data to facilitate the process needs. . Organisations need to look at outwards connectivity "Value chains", where processes include suppliers and customers, can provide distinct market differentiation where process connectivity is used successfully. . "Point-to-point" solutions will rapidly become unusable "Point-to-point" connectivity solutions require adaptors at the rate of the number of data stores/end points squared plus 1 (nē+1), whereas a bus- based approach only requires one adaptor per data store/end points (n). This means that managing a point-to-point architecture will rapidly become infeasible. . Contextuality of data connectivity is key To maintain business and technical flexibility, data mapping and transformations need to be carried out by adaptors associated with the data store/end point, and abstraction needs to be provided by a bus architecture. . Bus architectures cut down on the need for management and maintenance The intelligent abstraction of connectivity means that fewer adaptors need to be managed and maintained, enabling organisations to invest more IT budget in facilitating the business, rather than spending on fire-fighting and maintenance. Conclusion SOA will provide greater flexibility for organisations looking to automate and facilitate dynamic processes both within their own organisation and between themselves and their suppliers and customers. However, connectivity within an SOA is a major problem, and must be addressed at an early stage. The use of a bus architecture provides a high level of abstraction and minimises the number of adaptors required, while data transformation and intelligent data mapping helps to lower the time spent on retro-testing and maintenance costs. An independent report by Quocirca Ltd. www.quocirca.com Commissioned by IBM www.quocirca.com
1 SOA - Breaking Down the Barriers A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) brings a new approach to IT functionality within an organisation. Whereas old approaches had to come from a starting point of an application providing the total solution to specific problems, the idea behind SOA is to provide a far more flexible system, based on discrete pieces of functionality being called as required from any business function to facilitate specific business requirements. This approach has many benefits - for example, functional redundancy, where multiple applications carry out the same function within their own domain, is minimised, and the optimisation of any function provided in this way is immediately applied to all processes that use that function. The removal of functional redundancy also means that less hardware is required to run the function - no discrete resource is required for each of application a, b, c and d's version of the function; instead, the single instance of the function can be sized to meet the composite requirements of the multiple processes that will be calling this function. Also, SOA can provide a much greater level of flexibility when it comes to resource utilisation. With average hardware utilisation running around 10-15% in a standard... [download for more]
