As enterprises are beginning to expand the use of SOA (services oriented architecture), they are acknowledging that it involves much more than creating Web services that communicate with each other. In order to achieve better business outcomes – including improved responsiveness and lower cost – you need to address specific challenges. If you don’t, there is a very real risk your SOA initiative will fail.
The best way to get the full benefit of SOA with lower business risk is to concentrate on three key areas: governance, quality and management.
Governance requires a long-term view
Many organisations are inching their way toward service orientation, introducing services in a piecemeal fashion in response to specific business unit requests. Frequently, individual projects are built with an eye towards rapid delivery – often overlooking the bigger picture that should focus on building services that will last and be useful to the entire organisation.
To accomplish this, you need to deploy SOA governance, which addresses issues of interoperability, deployment, quality of services and maintainability.
If you don’t take this long-term view, your SOA can easily become an unmanaged conglomeration of temporary services that don’t support reuse or scalability.
Quality and management take on new meaning
From a quality standpoint, organisations must take into consideration that an SOA service is, by design, a single point of potential failure. If something goes wrong, more than one business process is likely to be affected – and it may be difficult to locate the problem.
An SOA is a highly complex environment to manage. In order to resolve performance-related issues, IT needs to extend existing tools with new capabilities that will help determine which service is causing the slowdown.
What you need to move ahead with confidence
HP’s approach to SOA is different. We recognise that most organisations will have multiple integration tools – for good reasons – so we aren’t going to try to get you started by having you standardise on a single integration product or architecture.
Instead, our tools and processes are designed to help you govern, test and manage your SOA across all your platforms – in conjunction with your traditional applications.
Whether you’re completely proficient with SOA, have already completed an assessment and are ready to go, or are still waiting to figure out what SOA is all about, HP has the expertise to help you assess your environment and can provide the quality, governance and management approaches you need.
|
 |
|
Printable version
