Getting SOA many benefits

But it`s more than just the latest buzzword in vendor`s marketing vocabularies, it`s a real-life concept, a series of steps that eventually lead to greater efficiency in business processes, better data quality, better access to key information. In some cases, it can make one feel like they can see into the future.

At the same time - however - many companies have experienced frustrations when developing SOA in their enterprises. The most common complaints, according to speaker Jeff Kristick, Tibco`s director of product marketing, are that the return on investment is not what was expected, and that the deployment process takes longer than initially thought.

Around the world, large corporates (for those are the ones set to benefit most from SOA) are moving rapidly through the adoption phases, and beginning to realise sustainable benefits from using standardised architecture to improve service interoperability, as well as assembling new composite applications and processes to satisfy business requirements.

CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

Sun International`s group manager for enterprise architecture, Kuben Naidoo, said his organisation has set out on its SOA journey. "We`re going through all the planning phases and bedding down the infrastructure - by June we expect to have completed this, and by the end of the year we will be delivering new business functionality," he told the audience.

"Our key objectives centre around customer management," Naidoo added.

Jonathan Evans, group manager for systems development and integration at Sun, explained that it`s important to get a grasp of what information and what processes are required for Sun to have a single view of the customer, across all spheres of the organisation.

Evans and Naidoo are developing SOA with the expectation that it will bring better time-to-market responses and better quality of data.

COMPETENCY CENTRES

"You have to have a team that is able to manage the [SOA] deployment," remarked Christo van Rensburg, director of professional services at Tibco, "they have to be able to continue with the innovation, to bring SOA and event-driven architecture into harmony."

At RMB Private Bank, that is exactly what happened. Ryan Herd and Louis Pienaar were brought in to develop a competency centre and get the bank`s SOA project moving.

"We use the backbone of FNB`s Hogan system for the transactional requirements, as well as many other systems within RMB, but until now there has been no glue to hold it all together," explained Herd.

The objective, for RMB, was developing a single user interface where employees will be spending less time on administration and "paper-trails", and more time looking at customer requirements, he added.

Pienaar admits that when RMB was small, it could get away with poor turn-around times. "But now, as we grow, our customer service levels have to keep improving - this is the business imperative driving SOA," he explained.

As understanding of this terribly difficult concept grows, so too will the number of companies who look seriously at SOA, noted BMI-Techknowledge`s Roy Blume. "SOA may be the first services-based innovation where the term relates to business services, rather than IT services," he added.