Covington
Do you agree with the statement: “Successful service-oriented architecture (SOA) enablement is less about technology than it is about getting business to talk to the IT department and vice versa?”
Cole
In today’s organisation, imperative to the success of business and/or IT projects is that different business units communicate and work together towards a common goal in a coordinated manner. Therefore, delivering SOA strategies for IT assets is no different. SOA is not a new approach.
[Our product] strategy has evolved from distributed transactions supported by Tuxedo to the bulletproof application infrastructure of WebLogic and now service infrastructure management capabilities of the AquaLogic product suite.
The next big thing we see is a user-centric SOA that focuses on the idea of bringing together information and functionality from any system in order to serve the needs of the end user. Taking a service-oriented approach can produce completely new types of applications that streamline the operations and work processes of end users across an organisation. This type of composite application can help to manage complex processes or bridge the gaps between existing systems to support the work people do across them.
Cole
What benefits can customers expect from adopting MDI?
Covington
Quantitative studies at researcher UBS have shown that MDI markedly improves total cost reduction, time to market as well as return on investment on existing IT assets when compared to traditional integration approaches. Secondly, the central maxim of MDI—“the documentation is the code”—leads to timely and transparent project execution, a much-needed property to restore confidence between business and IT.
Finally, MDI removes the innovation freeze by eliminating the sequential nature of business and IT evolution. This gives organisations the much needed agility and flexibility to quickly respond to an ever-changing market.
Covington
Covington
Whenever end user organisations get excited about SOA they mention vendor independence and the possibility to execute a best-of-breed strategy as the most significant value add. What other value adds do you see being significant?
Cole
If the promise of SOA was only to provide vendor independence and ability to deploy best of breed strategy then the business benefits of SOA would be minimal to none.
What we see is that there are different levels of maturity in understanding the concepts and techniques of SOA. For example, some organi•sations are still solely looking to free valuable business information from previously locked or “siloed” business systems. Some are looking for a platform independent orchestration to build a secure and robust user-centric applications based on an IT infrastructure that has been built with SOA framework.
So the optimum value to the customer comes from being able to leverage existing investment in systems, to provide a consistent security layer to ensure controlled access to valuable information and to provide a management layer spanning business processes to ensure compliance with quality-of-service levels.
Cole
How do organisations have to change their approach to SOA with MDI strategy?
Covington
Organisations don’t need to change their SOA approach at all. MDI acts as a catalyst for the chosen approach and helps execute it more rapidly and consistently. If the SOA approach aims to establish all services on a single-vendor platform, MDI will accelerate the integration of third-party components into that platform. If the approach aims for a best-of-breed strategy, MDI will wrap existing IT components so they can either be reused or easily replaced, should a better component emerge.
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