What Are the Benefits of Adopting an SOA?

SOAs make it easier to integrate the "everything but the kitchen sink" IT environments found in most companies. "That’s the big value of an SOA; it works very well in heterogeneous environments," says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, a Web services consultancy. Developers don’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time writing new lines of code to connect applications. Instead, they can use standard protocols, such as Web services. And large chunks of SOA code are reusable, reducing development costs. An SOA takes your legacy investments?your SAP, Siebel, Oracle and the like?and makes them all play nicely (and more cheaply) together.

"That’s the sweet spot for SOA?leveraging your existing portfolio," says Tim Bass, president of Silk Road, an IT consultancy. You don’t need to rip and replace those systems with brand-new ones. By identifying the capabilities of existing systems and leveraging them, you maximize the value of your IT investments while minimizing your risk, he says. Also, building services?for example, using simple object access protocol (SOAP) and Web services description language (WSDL)?not only smooths the internal integration process, it also lets customers and business partners share information more easily across company firewalls.

Another benefit of an SOA is that it can lead to a better dialogue between the CIO and line-of-business execs by forcing IT workers to think in terms of business?not technical?architectures. If a business wants to build a better inventory control system, for example, the operations folks can hook up with the IT architects and talk about the best way to design it based on business flows and how best to meet the needs of the business. And implementing that design, which often involves large-scale integration, becomes a less gruesome task.

For that dialogue to work, businesspeople have to think about the best ways to run their business. What processes do I need to put in place to best accommodate my customers? How can I improve my level of customer service? By exposing and sharing information across once-siloed applications, companies can extract more business performance data in real-time, improving business intelligence. There’s a whole new level of responsiveness companies can exploit through a common architecture, says Dana Gardner, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "If there’s a hurricane on the East Coast, [resulting in a] great need to move plywood from another part of the country, I can be responsive in real-time," he says. "I have information about what’s going on in my business that I didn’t have before." In a perfect SOA world, companies improve their ability to adapt to changing business requirements and shifting market conditions.