SOA, Web 2.0 And The Echo Boomer

The Echo Boomer generation is the first generation of technology-immersed employees, who take technology both in the workplace and in personal life entirely for granted. They have never known anything different. Echo Boomers have only a distant memory of dial-up Internet access, and have always had mobile phones, laptops, PCs, e-mail, SMS, MP3 players and YouTube.

The Echo Boomers are the most high-maintenance, highest performing workforce in the history of the world. As a result, the demands made by the Echo Boomer generation are changing the way companies service the application delivery needs of employees.

Echo Boomers assume that they will be able to receive information and applications on-demand and from anywhere. They are habitual parallel processors and multi-taskers and expect to be able to dictate the ways in which they interact with applications - both at work and play – as well as the locations from which they do so.

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At an application level, SOA (service oriented architecture) is important because the dynamic coupling of services enables the near on-demand production of new applications at greatly reduced cost.

The problem is that although fewer resources need to be poured into the design of application code, much more thought needs to be given to the mechanisms through which applications and the services of which they comprise are created and delivered.

Companies need a reliable infrastructure that dynamically assembles applications, networks and users without limiting flexibility at either end: An infrastructure that delivers predictable performance, security and cost savings regardless of how application and user variables are changing.

SOAs have a natural fit with the web and the Internet in that it is similar in concept to content mashups. This architecture can use web communication protocols and can be used to develop applications that support multi-channel access.

The consumption trends of Echo Boomers are characterised by the need for on-demand access to applications and services. But as Web 2.0 and the volumes of SOA-based web applications grow, there is a risk of a corresponding drop in quality. At the network layer, SOA implementations typically leverage inter-process communications based on open standards such as web services. These protocols, such as SOAP, tend to be quite chatty and often result in a large number of end-to-end network transactions. These network transactions can impact application performance if they involve connections across wide area networks or the Internet.

There remain many organisations who are attempting to implement SOA, but do little more than implement web services instead, ending up with redundant, incompatible, and often unmanaged services. Another challenge is that companies do not develop all of their web services internally and use web services provided by external entities. In those cases, companies have no guarantee of the availability and quality of that web service.

However, performance is absolutely key for SOA applications. Therefore, companies need to identify and deploy ways to accelerate the performance and increase the availability of such applications. With key technologies for optimisation, security, management, and control functions, application delivery infrastructure facilitates delivery of SOA applications.

To break SOA bottlenecks companies need to optimise both web applications and web services with load balancing, SSL Offload (which in turn provides a secure SOAP or XML transmission), caching, compression and TCP optimisation.

The convergence of SOAs, virtualisation architectures and Web 2.0 social software will drive the next wave of value creation within and across enterprises. The key to an application delivery infrastructure is its ability to automatically apply the best delivery technology for both SOA and non-SOA based applications, providing companies and users with maximum application flexibility.

Das is area vice president for Citrix India.