Sidebar: Technology Can't Fill All SOA Gaps

Computerworld - Some of the enterprises that are deftly moving toward a service-oriented architecture to exploit the potential of Web services are confronting challenges technology can't always conquer. Users say Web services still suffer from a lack of clear metadata definitions and the need for sometimes significant IT cultural changes.
Trimble Navigation Ltd., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based maker of Global Positioning System products, opted to use an SOA framework from Cordys Inc. to integrate the ERP systems of its five business units. But as the project has moved forward, it has been slowed by the lack of standard metadata definitions, which define and describe applications' data, said Robert Denis, vice president and CIO at Trimble.
Denis said that the company must create its own process for managing the disparate ERP systems' metadata because of a lack of tools that can automate the operation. The complex ERP network includes packages from SAP AG, Oracle Corp. and Siebel Systems Inc., some of which were gained via acquisitions.
Trimble learned that even using Web services, it isn't possible for the company to "gracefully and quickly" integrate systems gained in several acquisitions over the past couple of years because of the metadata problems, Denis said. "There's too much fluidity around data objects, [and] we fall back into our own nomenclature and begin to define business objects," he said. "Customer definitions are the most complex challenges for us. We support very different businesses. Our customers are major accounts, channels and end users, so it is difficult to have a one-size-fits-all definition." Until industry standards for metadata management mature, the company must tackle the metadata issues outside the SOA project, he said
Cultural Change
Navitaire, an application service provider that houses reservation systems for low-cost airlines, early this year will begin exposing applications as Web services to allow customers to more easily customize them, said Mark Leaming, Navitaire's vice president of product development. "They may decide they want to sell insurance through their booking process," Leaming said. "They can re-engineer the application using a Web service so their basic booking flow continues as is, but they may hook off and book insurance and have that whole process be completed in the overall booking flow."
Leaming noted that the migration to Web services required some cultural changes along the way, such as getting customers to change their mind-set about the way they use the system.
"Today, a customer gets a huge amount of data and filters through that in their own time," Leaming said. "There are some challenges in gettingthe adopters of Web services to make more requests in smaller chunks so they are not sending large amounts of data over the wire."