'Top Mgmt Commitment Is Integral To SOA Success'

Atul Saini, CEO and CTO of Fiorano Software, speaks with Biztech2.com on the common challenges that enterprises face while adopting SOA, some reasons for SOA project failures, challenges in India driving the demand for SOA and the UB Group’s experience of SOA adoption.

Based on your experience in the West, tell us about some common reasons why companies turn to SOA?

The most common reason for SOA adoption by customer firms has been that previous approaches to solving their problems have taken too much time and even after the problem is solved, there are too many bugs. Each time there is an outage, it is very difficult to resolve, resulting in downtime for the business. For example, at DHL, each time the IBM-based system would go down, the company (DHL) would lose hundreds of thousands of Euros because their planes would remain grounded.

Deploying new business functions/ processes was very time consuming because the IT systems were very difficult to change. So, instead of going from concept to implementation in four weeks, for example, in many cases, it took three to four months just to get started.

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What are the top three reasons leading to failure of SOA projects?

The top three reasons have been – incorrect choice of SOA infrastructure, inadequate training of internal resources and lack of a long-term commitment from the management (i.e. the people who hold the purse strings) to see projects through.

What are some of the challenges that Indian enterprises face that drives them towards SOA adoption?

To grow, Indian enterprises need to automate their businesses. Manual execution of processes will keep India well behind. For instance, any banking operation (opening or closing an account, changing specifications, etc) takes longer in India on average as compared to global standards. Online banking is in its infancy here. The same is true in manufacturing, logistics and other industries.

The previous – and mostly currently prevailing also – approach of hiring cheap programmers to do the job is doomed to failure. Management will have to learn (most likely the hard way, after continuous failure) that they have to spend on products and high-quality resources to automate their businesses. Only then can they really compete on a global scale.

Tell us about your partnership with the UB group. What is the IT set-up of the group like?

The UB Group offers over 140 brands. In recent years, the company is strengthening its international presence by acquiring foreign brands like Mackay in UK and Bouvet Ladubay SAS in France. It is one of the largest spirits manufacturers in India with 45 factories spread across the country.

The group deploys a wide range of software and hardware products to support its IT requirements. It deploys most of the applications on one of the three IBM i-Series, with different OS like OS/400, 64-bit Linux and Windows to support almost all the platform requirements. It also deploys a range of Wintel servers at various locations.

The various software used across the enterprise include SAP with around 400 users, Websphere Portals, Lotus Notes, Click View for data analytics, databases like DB2 and SQL servers along with a range of Java-based applications to support the different requirements and business processes. They have IT spread across 80 locations connected using MPLS, VSATs, and leased lines.

The distributed information in different locations and servers was making it very difficult for the IT department at UB to provide meaningful information stored in SAP to business executives and the senior management.

To meet the modern demand on IT to integrate the acquired applications and allow partners to share information, a stable and efficient Web services framework was required.

The group decided to go in for Fiorano’s SOA middleware platform. It is an SOA-based platform that allows application integration based on open standards like JMS, Web Services, JMX and a host of JCA based adapters and bridges. The ability of the Fiorano system to rapidly deploy business processes on SAP was critical to UB’s success.

UB estimates that it has already saved over Rs 2.5 crore in the first year of operations with a limited set of Fiorano flows. These savings are about to be multiplied several fold in the coming years. Apart from this, the system has also helped the group to eliminate the service tax levy, cut invoice processing time and save about 1,600 man hours.