Term Paper on "Service Oriented Architecture for E-Business Integration"

Term Paper 24 pages (6495 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

revolution that started when information technologies became aligned with business strategies has resulted in an emphasis on enterprise architectures that will bring greater flexibility and agility in responding to business strategies' demands. The emergence of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is a direct result of the alignment of information technologies to line-of-business goals and objectives. The strong focus on creating an architectural framework that allows for agility in sensing and responding to demands is also critical for any enterprise today. Essentially, SOA is a software architecture that starts with an interface definition and builds the entire application topology as a topology of interfaces, interface implementations and interface calls. SOA would be better-named "interface-oriented architecture." SOA is a relationship of services and service consumers, both software modules large enough to represent a complete business function. Services are software modules that are accessed by name via an interface, typically in a request-reply mode. Service consumers are software that embeds a service interface proxy (the client representation of the interface).

The intent of this thesis is to explore the current state of the SOA and its many implications for enterprises, across all major function areas, specifically focusing on the integrative data aspects of this it initiative. SOAs are essential to the strategic plans of many enterprises, and as a result are re-aligning the development strategies of thousands of software companies globally.

Service-Oriented Architecture Overview

Across the industry, interest in SOA is running high. These days, "service-oriented architecture" is consistently one of the top five search terms on many research company's websites, and in a January 2006 LWC Research survey, half of all companies -- and 77% of large enterprises -- reported that they are or will be using SOA by the end of 2006.

The factors behind this high level of adoption center squarely on the need for more efficiently driving business strategies using it as an agile and responsive resource. Evidence is further mounting that SOA provides real benefits for business integration and flexibility. It is important to keep in mind however that the main benefit of SOA is the opportunity for incremental development, deployment, maintenance and extension of business applications.

Many myths have developed in the industry around SOA. The reality is more modest, but also more immediately beneficial than the hype. SOA brings these benefits to enterprise it:

Incremental development and deployment of business software

Reuse of business components in multiple business experiences

Low-cost assembly of some new business processes

Clarity of application topology

SOA does not bring these mistakenly attributed benefits:

Simple software engineering

Free integration or interoperability

Technology independence

Vendor independence

The ultimate architecture for the modern enterprise

Through 2007, growing enterprise experience with SOA process and SOA-based applications will eliminate the myths and instill appreciation for the real benefits of SOA in most enterprises. Evolving tools, skills and best practices will make development of SOA-style applications easier than development of monolithic applications. This change will shift the massive software industry mainstream into the new software-engineering reality: By 2008, in all likelihood SOA will be a prevailing software engineering practice, ending the 40-year domination of monolithic software architecture. SOA is a good practice for software design. Although it is not an answer to all problems, SOA is useful and should be part of most modern software projects. Over time, lack of SOA will become a competitive disadvantage for most enterprises. Mainstream enterprises should invest today in understanding SOA and building SOA design and development skills.

This thesis begins with an overview of the concept of the Private Trading Exchange, and how this specific it strategy is instrument in the development of the Service Oriented Architecture.

How Private Trading Exchanges Lead to SOAs

With the high level of interest in SOA, vendors of all stripes are providing SOA products and features, presenting a confusing array of options for architects crafting their SOA platforms. Application server platforms, integration products, Web service specialist vendors, and management tool vendors all are aligning their product strategies to be a responsive resource to enterprises, and it architects and business strategists must determine which ones will provide the right combination of features. The confusing array of options was captured well by one customer services client, who asked about SOA, "What is the best selection of tools for our firm?" It only complicates matters that SOA platform investment priorities are different, depending on your initial and future plans for SOA.

Companies are asking themselves a multiple of questions including which products to launch through which channels, how to track sales performance throughout multiple channels, how to align and synchronize pricing across both indirect and direct channels. The advents of Service Oriented Architectures have been also driven by the need to synchronize the flow of information between buyers, suppliers, and customers. The interaction of these three critical constituencies first lead to the development of Public and Private Trading Exchanges (PTX), and the growth of collaborative commerce at the supply chain level. The structure of the PTX was first defined by AMR Research (2001) in the report, Building a Case for the Private Trading Exchange.

This landmark report was actually setting the stage for the creation of Service Oriented Architectures, as the many integration points between buyers, suppliers, and customers. Figure 1 shows an example of the diagram of what a PTX consists of. This is the beginning of the actual progression of it architectures to SOAs.

Figure 1: Structure of the Private Trading Exchange

The fundamental concepts behind PTXs in turn fueled the development of a series of exchanges that would later serve as the foundation for different SOA strategies as well. The Independent Vertical Exchange (IVX), Independent Horizontal Exchange (IHX), Consortium Trading Exchange (CTX) and the continual refinement of the PTX all lead to the development of SOA as a unifying concept of strategies, integration points and the role of the synchronization points in the architecture. Figure 2 provides an illustration fo the structural differences of these varying approaches to building trading exchanges, a precursor and the foundation of Service Oriented Architectures.

Figure 2: The structure of Private Trading Exchanges

As the foundation for the SOA architecture, the following PTXs is where many of the lessons learned in the initial definition of what would eventually become a more agile, more business centric approach to aligning it with the strategic direction of an enterprise. The various forms of PTXs that emerged are briefly described here, and each has had a specific influence on the current state of SOA planning, implementation, and use:

Independent Vertical Exchanges -- Exchanges that facilitate trade in order to make a market more efficient, and which have formed without significant investment from existing industry players. Examples include CheMatch, e-STEEL, and Sci-Quest. These exchanges struggle with liquidity, and will ultimately merge with physical intermediaries or become vertically-specific Application Service Providers (ASPs).

Independent Horizontal Exchanges -- Exchanges that facilitate economies for a specific business process that transcends vertical industries. Examples include National Transportation Exchange, e-Credit, and Branders.com. These exchanges struggle with domain expertise across verticals, and ultimately may become business process outsourcers to increase revenue.

Consortium Trading Exchanges -- Trade participants within an industry that join forces to make the vertical market more efficient. Examples include Transora, Covisint, and WorldWide Retail Exchange. These exchanges struggle with consensus among members and scope.

Private Trading Exchanges -- a single company that implements marketplace technology to enhance its own processes. These exchanges struggle with trust and multiple points of integration. When considering the corporate structures of Fortune 2000 companies, with multiple divisions and broad geographic scope, don't be fooled into thinking that the Private Trading Exchange is a one-to-many model. As the model matures, these companies will be as complex as those based on the many-to-many model of the Independent Trading Exchange (ITX). In addition, the PTX should benefit all members of the exchange, not just the deploying company.

2001-2004: Transition Period from PTX to SOA

As exchanges in general proved to be more structurally sound for order management and less agile than planned for, coupled with the fact that in many exchanges, the only factor everyone could agree on was how to complete a transaction, SOAs began to gain significant momentum.

Long-term business competitiveness and success require continual change and adaptation. Service-oriented architecture helps to solve immediate problems such as connecting to business partners, accessing legacy applications, and integrating across technology boundaries but, at a more strategic and fundamental level, SOA is about creating an it environment to support continuous business optimization.

With each new it project, applications increasingly embody your business processes which in turn make strategies only as flexible as applications. Too often, with your processes frozen in company's applications, it is hard to make the business connections necessary to change and improve processes, and it's speed of change is the limiting factor on business speed of change. By contrast, SOA structures it applications in line with your business processes and, as a result:

SOA speeds business change. In its core design strategy of… READ MORE

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