As part of developing its enterprisewide SOA strategy, the company is identifying the SOA standards around which of its needs are mature, which should be monitored and which are mandatory. Among these, GM is looking at WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 for enterprisewide interoperability. After this, the company will be able to make a well-informed decision about which vendors and products to use in its broad rollout of SOA.

Another SOA adopter, TD Banknorth, has taken a strategy of prioritizing standards adopted by vendors recognized as market leaders in the SOA space (for example, webMethods) and standards recognized by several key standards organizations. The banking company is using a service-based architecture as a framework for the development of Web services for application integration, according to CIO and executive VP John Petrey. TD Banknorth initially used SOA in 2004 when it deployed webMethods’ Fabric software suite to use a Web service to simplify the process of completing customer address changes.

The Web service, being implemented now, allows TD Banknorth’s call center agents or branch employees to make changes in address, then automatically have those changes take effect in each of the customer’s accounts with the bank. Today TD Banknorth is planning other SOA projects, one involving a small-business loan origination service and another for the company’s online banking system.

“The primary benefit of SOA we realize is significant reuse of services across the integration solution space,” Petrey says. That’s resulting in a substantial reduction in service development time and the creation of higher-quality services that require less debugging and testing, he says.

To date, TD Banknorth has adopted basic standards around Web services, including XSD, SOAP and WSDL, Petrey says. “Going forward, the most important standards will be related to WS-I, like policy, reliability and security, and, to a lesser degree, addressing,” he says.

The bank works “only with standards adopted by vendors recognized as market leaders in the SOA space…and regarded as sufficiently mature” by industry research firms such as Gartner, Petrey says. “The standards we adopt are recognized by multiple standards organizations like W3C and WS-I,” he adds.

TD Banknorth queried companies that had adopted standards such as WS-Security and SAML, “and found that most were struggling,” Petrey says. “The standards supposedly were ready for adoption over a year earlier, yet no one was really using the standards the way they were designed or marketed. We were unable to find a success story.”

Among the lessons the bank has learned in its foray into SOA: Build an architecture in a way that promotes a modular, flexible and incremental deployment, “with placeholders for those standards to be adopted as subsequent functionality requires,” Petrey says.