SOA grows up -- and out

Computerworld - Not too long ago, IT organizations turned to service-oriented architecture (SOA) primarily as a way to integrate enterprise applications. But now large companies are using SOA to create components that can be combined and reused as services across multiple applications.

This makes application updates easier and faster, reduces development time, improves service to customers and partners, and saves money.

It's still SOA, just all grown up.

"You don't get high marks anymore for simply writing Web service wrappers around existing applications," says Hamesh Yadav, lead systems architect at Wells Fargo & Co. in San Francisco and co-chair of The Open Group's service-oriented infrastructure working group. "SOA is more problem-based now."

While this broader use of SOA does lead to management challenges, including the need for "building in governance so you have a way to register and share services," he says, "the end result is a reduction of complexity" by making things more interoperable.

At Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., in Springfield, Mass., the SOA project now incorporates around 100 services, including distribution management, premium collections, customer information management, new business and underwriting.

These services integrate applications across business units, each of which markets different products. Instead of replacing an existing application wholesale, business units select an appropriate combination from the company's array of shared services," says Kinam Peter Kim, vice president of enterprise SOA strategy at MassMutual.

MassMutual's Don Carten says the right people and standards are key to SOA success.

"To us, SOA is not a technology. It is an approach to modernize our business -- an approach to create an adaptable enterprise," Kim explains.

Well-designed SOA services are reusable for both business process automation and systems integration. For example, MassMutual's shared business functions, such as security, are placed into repositories. These shared functions conform to the IT department's governing policies, which in turn determine which applications use the shared services.

When the company was considering revamping its SOA approach in 2007, the IT team realized that instead of changing the architecture model, they could instead use one model across all business units.

"We asked questions like, what does SOA mean for our business?" says Don Carten, assistant vice president of enterprise technology at MassMutual. "We thought about the approach, what funds to lay out, practices, what services do we use. Then we built a team that was core to the program... and built out the services using well-known standards."

SOA: Broadening and deepening

"SOA is moving into the mainstream, where it becomes a component of other things," says Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "Companies define Web services, write the code and then deliver the [application] service," he says.