SOA Still Isn't Just For Integrating Legacy Systems
Service-oriented architecture is not just for legacy systems but can be strategic for Startups as well. Service-now.com, a SaaS provider of IT Service Management solutions, has used SOA as a competitive advantage.
Luddy and team had the luxury of starting with a blank sheet of paper and applying the lessons learned from his years of working on packaged software products. Like I mentioned in my previous article, startups do not have to deal with some of the big challenges that established companies have to deal with while implementing SOA: namely culture change and business process reengineering. The whole team clearly understood the SOA vision and the benefits that came with it. There was no resistance to change here. Also, the business processes were being created from the ground up so there were no existing business processes to change. This was the perfect scenario for implementing SOA. The team established standards upfront and created an architecture that provided them the simplicity, flexibility, agility, and ease of integration that would separate them from their competition. In 2005 their Java-based product was commercially available. Today their product has over 30 built-in integrations such as Tivoli, OpenView, LDAP, SMS, SiteMinder, and Oracle Financials.
Reaping the benefits
Service-now.com is now reaping the benefits of their strategic use of SOA. Their product is extremely configurable which allows them to easily adapt to change. One of their biggest challenges is integrating with partners who do not have a flexible architecture. They have had to write several adapters for partners to provide a seamless integration. Recently they integrated with SalesForce.com who also has an excellent standards based SOA product offering. The integration took only one week! Try that with your existing problem management and CRM system! Another benefit is that a single code base can be deployed on premise or hosted Service-now.com.
Also with SOA, Service-now.com claims there are fewer moving parts to complicate integrations. A pure SOA implementation should be largely platform and technology neutral, meaning that .NET to Perl or Perl to Java for example is very easy to achieve. When properly designed, SOA makes versioning of software on both sides of the integration less challenging.
