Change management, as it used to be called, or the new buzzword ‘governance’ is a key component of any SOA.

If we consider that one of the main benefits of SOA is reuse, this can sometimes only happen when slight modifications are made to a service to allow it to be used for a different purpose. The change will normally not impact on the previous use but to ensure reuse, the change must be made.

It is key that an existing, running service does not break so there must be different versions of a service available during the transition phase. However, once working, it is essential that the existing users of the old service are upgraded to avoid having to support multiple versions of the service. As such the usage of your services is key to this change management.

SOA Governance with the correct tools can be extremely helpful in upgrading services ensuring continued reused and deprecation of older copies of the service. There are two documents here which discuss how both life cycle and usage governance of your services can help your organization. These governance capabilities are all implemented in the SOA Gateway.

Is SOA dead within the enterprise ?

It is often said that SOA is dead simply because it does not appear to have been adopted in any great way by many enterprises but nothing could be further from the truth.

We need to consider here that enterprises change very very slowly for good reasons. They have systems running for many years that have served them very well. Many have learned through painful experience that making quick changes can costs millions in lost business and productivity through systems working slowly or not being available.

The point is that 2, 3 or even 5 years in the IT cycle of an enterprise is not a huge amount of time. Many will IPL (reboot to readers unfamiliar with this term) their enterprise systems (normally large mainframes) only once or twice a year which may surprise many people who see Windows and Linux as being the be all and end all of computing and a regular reboot as being a fact of life. Many enterprises have adopted a SOA approach over the years already so SOA is really just a new term for what they have been doing before it was called SOA.

Many enterprises have been using services for many years and will continue to align these with the external services provided via the Web and other new channels over time and more than likely even when someone has come up with some new term for it. The SOA Gateway is a simple way of introducing a SOA structure into your enterprise.

What is a standards based SOA ?

In the early days of SOA discussions, many people would have understood the term SOA to relate to implementing services using the following standards amongst others:

-         TCP/IP and HTTP to provide the connectivity to the machine(s) where the services reside.

-         eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to provide a platform, technology and language neutral way to exchange messages.

-         Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) which enables a service to describe in XML what it can do and how to call it. This is the piece that enables software to understand what a service can do and how to call it without any software installation being required on the client system accessing the service.

-         Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which is used to build the request message (based on what was learned from the WSDL) to issue a request to a service and to receive a response from a service.

Using the above standards, technologies like MS InfoPath and many other technologies that understand these standards can:

-         Connect to another computer and request the WSDL for a service using TCP/IP and HTTP.

-         Receive and parse the WSDL (written in XML) to determine what methods the service offers.

-         Build a SOAP request to invoke the service and to understand the SOAP response from the service.

While SOA has come to mean different things to different organizations depending on what they are trying to sell, using the above standards and other related standards will ensure your services can be used again and again by multiple technologies on multiple different platforms and represents the ‘standards based SOA’ mentioned in the title. The SOA Gateway enables the creation of standards based services using configuration and without any coding whatsoever.

When is a SOA implementation complete ?

This is a question that is raised many times as it is quite normal to want to draw a line under any effort when it has been completed.

SOA at its highest level is architecture and an organization wide philosophy of how things will be done drawing input from the business and IT parts of an organization. Unless your organization intends to stay static for the foreseeable future, the SOA Implementation is an ongoing effort as each new project emerges.

During the early stages of the implementation of a SOA in your organization, there will be many projects planned and ongoing as you move forward to improve what is currently there. Many SOA projects will be completed as you proceed but in the early stages at least, there will always be further projects to complete.

As SOA becomes embedded in the organization, the numbers of projects will potentially be reduced, however, in a vibrant organization, things are continually changing and new projects will always be on the cards. These too must be implemented to work within your new SOA.

Ultimately while individual SOA projects will be completed, the effort to implement SOA in your organization must continue forever and will continue to provide benefits as your organization progresses.The SOA Gateway can form a key part of any SOA strategy.

Key issues for implementing SOA

The primary issue that needs to be considered when implementing a SOA is that the entire organization is on board. If some parts of your organization are implementing an SOA and others have not bought into it, you will end up with similar issues as exist when an SOA is not implemented at all. Educating the entire organization in relation to why a SOA is being implemented and the benefits it can bring is the first key issue.

The second key issue comes down to the technology choices that will be made. There are many technologies available that tell you that they ‘do’ SOA, however, many still tie you into proprietary interfaces and technologies. Implementing a standards based SOA by choosing technologies that use standards like SOAP, REST, UDDI etc. can provide additional benefits:

• You are free to choose best of breed technologies that support the standards that you will use for each different service.


• You could potentially use different technologies that implement the same standards. While this may sound strange, one product may offer advantages in terms of cost or levels of support for different services that are implemented.


• In many cases, these technologies will be licensed based on how much you use them. This means that their cost is an operational cost as against more traditional models which require investment of significant capital up front.

Finally starting with a small effort can help you to develop implementation processes for your organization in a practical way thus helping you to improve your planning and delivering what your users want on time and within budget. The SOA Gateway provides the perfect tool to investigate how implementing a SOA may help in your organization.

Small or medium size Organizations and SOA

The first question one has to ask here is do you not see your organization being a medium or large organization in the future? If so this becomes rhetorically a question about where your organization will be in 5 years time.

SOA is more a business concept than a technical concept. One would have to assume that organizations are continually striving to improve their ‘services’ and the delivery of those services. The services your organizations provide are improved by:

• Speeding up delivery of the service.


• Removing red tape.


• Ensuring a consistent result when the service is used each time.


• Ensuring that when things go wrong (as they will), that you deal properly with the failure to the satisfaction of your customer.

From an IT perspective, exactly the same process applies. You should be looking at the parts of your services that are repetitive and thus take time. Identifying  where it make sense to use IT (for manual, repetitive tasks) and where it doesn’t (where a human being is absolutely needed) is the first step to mapping many of your existing manual procedures involved in a providing a service to lower level services that can be implementing efficiently and consistently using a SOA IT Infrastructure.

From that perspective, SOA is for every level of organization; while there is a perception out there that SOA tools and technology is too cost prohibitive for small organizations, this is not the case. There are many tools and services around for implementing SOA which charge based on usage which is cost effective for even the smallest organizations.

Is SOA for every business ?

Consider many large and successful businesses today and the amounts they spend on their IT. Each of these companies started out as small and medium sized enterprises and are spending literally millions each year trying to undo the IT short cuts they may have taken in the past.

Large companies now see the value of a SOA and what it can bring them in terms of costs savings and business agility and so are attempting to convert or move their systems to such an architecture.

So the question really is whether your organization intends to grow and become larger ? If it does, as I would expect all would aspire to, why not get your IT right now ? Implementing a SOA as early as possible provides the foundations to enable your business to scale from an IT perspective in the same way that you expect it will scale in terms of what the business does.

Not implementing a SOA now will mean you incur costs and delays into the future when your business begins to get bigger; and the tactical, stop gap decisions you may be tempted to take with your IT now will come back to haunt you in the future. The SOA Gateway is a tool that can help you to implement a SOA in any size or scale of business.