SOA centers take apps apart to put them back together

A key promise of SOA is that services can be built once and used often, thus cutting down on cost and time for completing a new project. “Reusability is a big benefit that SOA will be able to deliver. That and interoperability is the whole point about SOA,” says Marianne Hedin, an analyst at the research firm IDC.

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The model is a “win-win” for both the vendor and customers, Hedin says. It is a win for IBM, as it will speed up application development, and it’s a win for the client, as it will be less expensive to license a preconfigured solution.

Building reusable assets
Given a complex development and integration project, which services should get tapped for reusable components? IBM’s strategy so far has been to select reusable services based on their potential to be applied to other customer solutions.

Once reusable assets are identified, IBM abstracts the process logic from the IT implementation, making it easy to customize or modify the process, while minimizing change to the IT implementation, says Sudhir Sastry, leader of IBM’s SOA Solutions Center in Pune, India.

If the process was directly coded into the IT implementation before, IBM now uses process-modeling tools to develop a workflow for the process, and then applies business objects and the interfaces for the specific IT implementation, Sastry adds.

For example, the company was recently tapped to develop an order-entry system for a U.S.-based telecommunications service provider. The solution needed to allow the service provider to provision voice, video, and data and other services on a single order entry system, bundle services for a customer and provide cross-service discounts, says Jasabanta Choudhury, telecom practice leader at the GBSC.

Looking at the requirements, IBM decided that the order-entry process would be relevant to other telecommunications companies that are trying to shore up flagging margins.

“Until now the information that was available to service providers about customers was in silos, so they could not have a complete view of the customer and all the services [available to] him,” Choudhury says.

Making the order reusable beyond IBM’s specific consulting engagement posed a number of problems, however. For example, the entry system would have to be usable by customers across multiple geographies. To accomplish that, the GBSC tapped internal documentation of telecommunications processes and adopted standards developed by the TeleManagement Forum, a telecommunications industry association, Choudhury says.

Having satisfied its U.S. customer, IBM has now deployed the same order entry asset for a customer in Europe. And more orders are in the pipeline, Choudhury adds.

SOA components have helped IBM along the way, as it moves from a labor-based application development model to an asset-based deployment approach, according to Cherian.

“If we create an asset and go to a customer, it is 70 to 80 percent made, and then we will use the client’s unique processes to make it unique for the client,” Cherian adds.

Application-like — but not actually applications
The strategy to get into reusable assets took about three years to evolve within IBM. Because reusable software assets are similar to products, IBM’s consulting business needed to build skills along the way in areas like version management and maintenance of the asset, which it had to learn from the software group, according to Cherian.