Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)

What is it?

Why is this such a hot topic in IT?

Does it affect your business?

Do you need it?

These are the questions businesses should be asking themselves. Like the raise of the internet this new technology is going to affect everyone eventually, if not now, then you will be using it in 10 years or so.

What is it?

In simple terms this allows software packages from different companies to ‘talk to each other’ in a standard and secure manner over the internet or via a ‘Virtual Private Network’ VPN.

Most websites allow people to query the status of their orders, this is an extension of this and will allow automated systems to query this type of information. It means businesses should now start thinking about what services they need to publish on their websites to enable to work with their partners or clients.

You will often see SOA technology referred to as ‘Web Services’ or ‘SOAP’, don’t be put off, it is exactly the same technology.

Why is this such a hot topic in IT?

Companies small, medium and large are always forming partnerships to deliver services or create new products, they recognise they do not have all the skills in their own companies and it more efficient to obtain those skills from outside. The difficulty comes when ‘sending’ or ‘collecting’ the required information between partners. This has always been at best, cumbersome and at worst, nearly impossible; It is known for companies to employ people to manually transfer information from one system to another, which is extremely expensive and wasteful.

This architecture solves this problem by having ‘industry agreed standards’ for this integration. Not only does this remove the need for manual intervention, it will also allow your systems to contain up to the minute information.

Does it affect your business?

The answer is probably yes, it will affect everyone eventually. Take for example a package you post, at the moment to find out the status of this package you must log into the courier’s website. But in the future it will be very easy to automatically get your own systems to pick up that information. As this functionality becomes the norm, it will be the companies offering these integration services whose businesses will grow most rapidly.

Do you need it?

That decision is up to you? Do you partner with other companies? Would it benefit you by offering this service, or are your partners asking you to use it. Like everything, it’s up to you to recognise whether this technology will give you a competitive advantage.

Examples

We developed a SOA service between the insurance company CoverSure and the NHF. This enables CoverSure from within there own systems to check whether this person is a paid up member of the NHF and therefore entitled to the discounted insurance. Integrating these two systems offers benefits to both parties and avoids any increase in workload on either side.

We developed a Web Service interface which connects to ‘Peregrines Service Centre’, it can create and query tickets and pass the status back to the client. This solution gives the client’s employees a simple ‘one stop shop’ to obtain the status of their requests, but also integrates into the existing corporate systems so the business can continue to progress orders in the existing manner.

We developed a SOA service, between UNISYS and HBOS. The HBOS systems would ask what Branches are going to ‘upgraded’, it would then communicate secure information to those branches and would then tell UNISYS this work had been completed. This allowed us to process the workflow tasking automatically without the need for people to monitor this.

We are currently developing an interface between EMC² and UNISYS, so that new orders can send to UNISYS and the order status queried at any time. The aim is to optimise the order process and remove duplicate keying.

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