Five Killer Trends that Would Redefine Business Apps

Continued from page: 4

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Seamless Business Processing through SOA

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Today enterprises demand data immediacy, accuracy and security from one end of the business process to another. But since most have monolithic applications running on disparate, unconnected systems, this demand seems very difficult to meet. Monolithic applications such as ERP, CRM or SCM had efficiently resolved productivity and control issues over their functional domains.

But when it comes to collaboration and resource sharing amongst different departments, there was a wide chasm as business processes of one application couldn't communicate with some other app's processes. This was because these discrete applications did not follow or implement open standards like SOAP or XML, which facilitate inter-platform communication.

Therefore, there was a need for a seamless system for enterprises, where they would be able to shift their focus and resources from maintaining separate applications to adopting an end-to-end business process based on customer service.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has come out as an answer to the demands of today's fast-moving, business-critical environments.

SOA has made it possible for an organization to streamline communication across disparate business applications such as ERP, CRM or SCM.

It's a conceptual framework that enables enterprises to weave business processes with IT infrastructure, by integrating data and business logic of their disparate applications. And as the enterprises race toward SOA implementation for optimizing business processes and streamlining communications across various department-based applications, the software application vendors have started their own initiatives for SOA.

On the one hand, they are providing platform for SOA based business architecture and on the other, they are making business applications that are SOA compliant.

Benefits of SOA

The benefits of an SOA based business environment are multifarious. The SOA approach is generally focused on business processes. This means by integrating business processes, an enterprise can achieve cost-reduction, service re-use and faster response to business needs.

By integrating loosely-coupled business processes, that allows one discrete application to communicate with the other, a bridge can be achieved that eliminates the time lag for information flow amongst applications.

Using SOA, an enterprise would be able to keep its investments in existing legacy systems. This way an enterprise would be able to adopt and integrate their legacy apps with newer applications, without having to make their old legacy systems and data redundant. So they can build a flexible and standards-based software foundation for the future.

SOA enabling apps
SOA based business models are available from almost all major software solutions providers. The likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, IBM and BEA, all have their own initiatives for SOA as a business integration solution. Similarly, business application vendors have started providing solution packages that are compliant with SOA standards.

With an SOA compliant business application, an organization can integrate their legacy systems with these apps over an SOA enabling platform. IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino 8 is a suite of software that can play a key role in an organization's plan for SOA implementation. They provide seamless integration among different desktop utility applications and also enhance collaboration.

On the other hand to integrate business applications with ERP, SAP has provided NetWeaver as an integrating platform.

Microsoft, with their Visual Studio 2008 has provided developers an SOA standards based development environment on which applications meant for seamless business activity can be developed.

The adoption of such platforms and development environment for SOA implementation, gives an organization the flexibility of business services development by reducing the need to solve the complexity of underlying infrastructure technologies of applications and their frameworks.

As one can see, SOA is a different way of building and deploying enterprise applications. It's a complete architecture, which would require some time to settle in. However once it's done, it would make enterprise application integration a breeze.

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