The Value of SOA, XML Web services

One of the fastest moving and most exciting technologies being deployed today is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  SOA is a concept that enables applications to share common functionality promoting reuse rather than rebuild of core functions.  For example, many financial services applications will contain their own currency conversion functions.  Rather than incurring the cost of building and managing multiple currency conversion functions for each application, the enterprise could build these functions once, and share them via service-oriented architecture to drive reuse and minimize cost within the applications.

SOA is not a new concept, but it has had new life breathed into it with the emergence of XML and Web services as standards-based mechanisms for realizing an SOA using Internet technologies.  Growing numbers of commercially available applications and even more homegrown applications are exposing core functionality as XML and Web services.  Mainframe and other legacy applications are gaining a new lease on life as they expose interfaces as Web services to integrate with emerging enterprise applications like Portals. This presents a growing number of standards-based interfaces enabling low-cost, short lead-time integration of enterprise applications.  As this process continues, the potential cost saving and value associated with an SOA will grow exponentially.

SOA Challenges

There are several fundamental challenges organizations must overcome in order to realize the value of an SOA:

• Security of the services and messages is critical.  Service provider and consumer endpoints must be able to leverage existing Identity and Access Management infrastructure to ensure trusted end-to-end authentication, authorization, privacy, non-repudiation and auditing of XML and Web services business transactions.
• Reliability of message transport is essential.  XML and Web services messages must be able to be delivered over multiple transports including message bus services.  Messages must be able to be routed seamlessly between Internet (http and https) and JMS/MQ transports.
• Quality-of-service management for applications that consume Web services.  XML and Web services will often be used by many different applications with very different users and priorities associated with them.  As the network of services becomes busier it is essential that the SOA Fabric is able to route messages appropriately to guarantee that services can meet committed service level agreements (SLA) for these different user constituencies.
• Policy implementation and compliance challenge for developers reusing existing Web services, especially given the fast changing complex policies for security and management that are often associated with services.  It is key that an SOA fabric is in place to fully abstract developers of both services and consumers from this complexity.
• Service virtualization is essential to facilitate reuse and mitigate the risks of service failure or change management.  A valuable function of an SOA fabric is to ensure that consumers are never directly connected to service endpoints.  Without such a fabric in place it is easy to envision an environment where multiple applications will fail simultaneously, simply because one minor Web service that each application depended on was updated, relocated, or failed.

The SOA Software™ Solution

SOA Software’s Service Manager™ and Partner Manager™ implement a complete SOA Fabric solution delivering all the functionality of Web Services Management (WSM) products, UDDI Registry, Web Services Security (WS-S) solutions, XML Firewall appliances, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solutions and SOA and Web services Registries (UDDI) and meta-data repositories.  It provides a comprehensive framework for securing and managing XML and Web services ranging from individual services through networks of services to a complete SOA.  SOA Software products leverage a highly flexible architecture ensuring ease of implementation in any enterprise environment.  These products are certified Ready for Tivoli, and have been proven in production environments with a wide range of WebSphere application servers and other products.

SOA Software is the leading provider of comprehensive SOA security, management, and provisioning solutions.  It is the only company that offers a complete SOA fabric for the largest corporations in the world.  SOA Software’s solutions enable code reuse, guarantee quality-of-service, and ensure the security of mission critical data to unlock the enormous cost savings potential of Service Oriented Architecture, XML and Web services.