'CIOs Are Now Looking At SOA As A Business Enabler'

With the acquisition of BEA, Oracle has leapfrogged into a commanding position in the middleware market and is leveraging this new position to change the market dynamics. Shailender Kumar, vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware, talks to Biztech2 about how Oracle is gaining a foothold in the middleware market.

Could you tell us in detail about Oracle’s SOA offerings and strategy?

In January 2008, Oracle acquired BEA Systems, a provider of enterprise application infrastructure solutions. The addition of BEA has helped accelerate our product innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure. The acquisition has further increased the value that Oracle delivers to customers and partners. Together, Oracle and BEA provide a complementary best-in-class middleware portfolio that spans Java Application Servers, transaction processing monitors, SOA and business process management, user interaction and Web 2.0, identity management, business intelligence, enterprise content management and vertical-specific technologies.

How has SOA evolved since its introduction in the Indian market?

In the past, organisations and IT departments perceived SOA more as an investment in technology rather than a business decision. However, this trend is changing and CIOs and decision makers are now much more familiar with the concept of SOA – they are experiencing the business benefits of investing in SOA-based IT architecture.

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While the early adopters of SOA in India have been the banking and financial services sectors, companies in healthcare, retail, manufacturing, government and telecom are now considering this technology to meet regulatory compliance, integrate business processes, address real-time responsiveness and handle transactional complexities.

There was a lot of movement towards SOA implementation in 2007, with almost every CIO speaking about introducing or already implementing SOA in his/ her organisation. What has been your experience on the uptake of this technology?

As I mentioned, the adoption of SOA in India started much later than organisations based in more mature global markets. But now this is changing. Increasingly, organisations are looking to adopt SOA technology to help them acquire regulatory compliance and integrate business processes.

With business expanding fast, there is a need for orders to be processed quickly, and employees are being hired more quickly than ever before. With all this, organisations are being challenged to keep pace because of the complex and isolated assortment of software that runs their businesses.

SOA can enable organisations to transform their IT infrastructure to stay ahead of the competition—without having to start from scratch. With SOA, a once-unmanageable mix of applications can be integrated. Application components can be re-used. New business processes can be created quickly.

What are the main benefits of SOA? Apart from large enterprises, are SMBs also exploring SOA in a big way and how will it benefit them?

SOA helps businesses respond quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions they face. By adopting SOA, they can re-use existing IT assets rather than investing in more time consuming and costly reinvention or new implementations (rip and replace). Leading companies are tackling the complexity of their application and IT environments with SOA, which facilitates the development of modular business services that can be easily integrated and re-used — creating a flexible and adaptable IT infrastructure.

Some of the benefits that SOA brings include –

• Lower development costs — SOA services are easily re-used and can be rapidly assembled like building blocks into new, composite applications without higher-cost manual programming

• Lower maintenance costs — Re-usable services reduce the number and internal complexity of IT services, lowering the amount of maintenance support required for the entire services portfolio

• Higher quality services — SOA heavily promotes the increased service re-use that creates more reliable, higher-quality services through multiple testing cycles from different service consumers

• Lower integration costs — Standardised services know how to work together, enabling disparate applications to quickly and easily connect

• Reduce risk — Fewer, reusable services provide greater control over corporate and IT governance policies and reduce the overall risk of non-compliant behaviour.

How flexible or strict are your proprietary standards for SOA?

Oracle’s strategy is clear. We believe in providing customers with complete, open and integrated solutions to meet their business demands. Our products work in heterogenous IT environments and are developed using standard, industry components.

Oracle’s family of middleware products comprises comprehensive, standards-based application infrastructure software – from a Java application server to SOA and Enterprise 2.0 portals. It offers unique hot-pluggable capabilities that allow customers to extend existing investments in complex and diverse IT environments.

What are the inherent challenges in the deployment or migration towards SOA? How can they be overcome?

One obvious challenge faced is managing services metadata. SOA-based environments often include many services, which exchange messages to perform tasks. Depending on the design, a single application may generate millions of messages. Managing and providing information on how services interact is a complicated task. Many vendors are working on offerings to address this particular challenge with a sectoral point of view.

Another challenge is providing appropriate levels of security. Applications, which consume services, particularly those external to company firewalls, are more visible to external parties than traditional monolithic proprietary applications. The flexibility and reach of SOA can compromise security. As SOA specifications are constantly being expanded, updated and refined, there is a shortage of skilled people to work on SOA-based systems including the integration of services.