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Carphone Warehouse uses SOA to develop IT systems faster

Every few years, the IT industry throws its marketing weight behind a new TLA (three-letter acronym) that it claims will revolutionise our organisations.

These have included such erstwhile luminaries as TQM (total quality management), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and BPR (business process reengineering). The latest pretender to the TLA throne is SOA (service-oriented architecture).

Essentially, SOA is an approach where software applications on a network – or extended network of partners, suppliers and customers – work independently but speak a common language allowing them to interoperate flexibly. As a result, they can be loosely coupled together and accessed by one another, irrespective of each service’s underlying technology platform.

SOA extends the concept of software reuse, popularised at the micro level by object-oriented programming, to the macro level – giving firms a way to rapidly change their processes to meet business needs and create new applications, built from their own services or in collaboration with partners and third parties.

Right now, technology and IT service suppliers are all rushing to rebrand their offerings as SOA. The acronym screams at you from ads, articles, white papers and web sites. But where does the hype end and the reality begin?

Will SOA really give our businesses the agility to scale new heights, or three years hence will we all be left hanging, waiting for the industry to throw us yet another TLA lifeline?

Neil Ward-Dutton, research director at consultancy Macehiter Ward-Dutton, says there are some vendors who would have you believe SOA is the answer to whatever business question is posed. ‘It is not,’ he says. ‘SOA is not something you buy, it is a way of doing things.’

The popularity of the SOA concept stems from the high-level aim of many businesses to improve their agility to compete successfully in an ever faster-moving business landscape.

Ward-Dutton says SOA is particularly suitable where the most important objectives are to be able to integrate or change things very quickly and flexibly.

‘In three years I do not think there will be huge changes in the business landscape,’ he says. ‘But I expect to see pockets where there are much more dynamic, even opportunistic, relationships between firms partnering to deliver products and services that may have quite short lifespans.’

A spring 2006 survey by analyst AMR Research found 21 per cent of firms had already implemented some form of SOA, but recent research suggests that figure is set to increase dramatically.

Ian Finley, a research director at AMR, says the number of respondents planning to evaluate or implement SOA in the next 24 months has jumped from 53 per cent last year to 81 per cent.

One user already seeing the benefits of the architecture is mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse, which is using a Tibco SOA platform.

David Byrne, the firm’s architecture director for group IS, says using a service-based approach means that changes in business requirements have lower, more localised impact on the development of the firm’s IT systems.

‘This increases our ability as an IT function to provide high-quality solutions faster, enabling our business to bring new offerings to market earlier,’ he says.

Such benefits mean the unrelenting industry bandwagon and the continued adoption of SOA is inevitable, says Rob Hailstone, software infrastructure practice director at analyst Butler Group.

‘My expectation is that over the next few years it is going to become increasingly difficult to buy applications that are not built on an SOA foundation,’ he says. ‘So, even if for no other reason, people are going to be doing SOA because that is the way the applications they buy work.’

But Hailstone says whether all organisations will succeed in exploiting the full potential of SOA is not so cut and dry.

‘Only a small percentage actually understand what it can do for them and set themselves up in a way they can exploit,’ he says.

Some companies will be able to change fundamentally what they do, others will not.

‘SOA has the potential to allow a firm to change the way it does business, but unfortunately only a minority of companies have the skills and the commitment to see it through,’ says Ward-Dutton.