Disparate IT Groups Joining Forces in SOA Projects

Computerworld - The move to service-oriented architectures is requiring development groups in some companies to forge closer relationships with IT operations and deployment groups.

For example, American Modern Insurance Group Inc. must bring together its developers and the team responsible for deploying applications as it continues an SOA project that will replace two Unisys ClearPath mainframes and two databases with a single IBM zSeries mainframe running the DB2 database.

The $62 million project will also replace a core legacy Cobol application, said Patrick Law, vice president of infrastructure at the Amelia, Ohio-based insurer.

Law said the two groups must decide together how best to "package" the services to gain optimum performance and reliability. In addition, a cooperative effort is needed to determine which services will run on specific platforms, such as host servers, application servers and portals. "In the old days, there was no such concept as needing to worry about packaging, because everything [was] put on one machine and run," he said.

T-Mobile International AG is working to ensure cooperation between IT development and operations groups for an SOA project set to start in May. The effort is aimed at creating a common authentication and authorization services layer for a micropayments application.

Such cooperation between the groups would also ease the process of executing several similar SOA projects that are slated to begin over the next two years, said Alastair Wade, principal consultant at Buffalo, N.Y.-based Computer Task Group Inc., which is working with Bonn-based T-Mobile on the project.

Wade said that the relationship between the T-Mobile IT development and operations groups had to change because the SOA project will allow applications to run on multiple platforms, such as a hardware appliance from DataPower Technology Inc. that helps secure the processing of the messages within the SOA.

"What you have there is a platform in a box -- it is not just a piece of hardware," Wade said. While IT operations maintains the system, "the application development department [also] needs to be involved with this," he said. For example, Wade said, developers need to gain knowledge about networking and components of the network from operations staff.