An IT architecture based around services could help
users tackle computationally complex tasks in the area of real-time
decision support.
In areas involving real-time transaction processing, such as
banking, coping with exceptions requires costly manual
intervention. If this could be automated, businesses could reap
huge savings.
Analysts believe service oriented architectures (SOAs) could
provide a simple way of achieving tasks that require vast amounts
of programming, such as exception handling in banking.
SOAs use web services standards to overcome many of the problems
of integrating different IT systems. One of the main benefits of an
SOA running across the business is that different IT systems can be
monitored simultaneously to discover complex patterns of events
occurring within business processes automatically. This would allow
businesses to automate complex event handling - known as event
stream processing.
Ovum analyst Bola Rotibi said, "Any event handling is complex."
The challenge is that IT systems run multiple events in parallel.
"Keeping things in synch is quite an issue."
With an SOA, users can set up trigger points. "When one event
occurs, it is flagged - so if another event occurs you can match,"
she said. Developing such systems requires heavy programming.
Three companies specialising in SOAs have unveiled a blueprint
for helping users progress from simple to complex IT systems based
on services.
The SOA maturity model has been jointly developed by middleware
developer Sonic Software, management tools supplier AmberPoint,
and consulting firm BearingPoint. It has been designed to give IT
directors a way to develop their own roadmaps for rolling out
SOAs.
Starting with individual projects, users begin to apply metrics
to their SOA and start linking other functional areas of the
business together as they increase their expertise in building
applications based on a service-based architecture. More
sophisticated use leads to an architecture that supports
collaboration between businesses units and business-to-business
connectivity.
David Chappell, chief technology evangelist at Sonic Software,
said many users were beginning to pilot SOA-based systems using the
WS standards and Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol).
Once people have gained an understanding of a basic SOA, they
can start building architectures that work across functional
business units. Event stream processing is possible once the
business is running on an SOA.
The highest level in the blueprint put forward by Sonic,
AmberPoint and BearingPoint is where users are able to run business
activity monitoring and automatically adapt business processes.