JACKMAN
Do you have a view on the so-called “orchestration issues” related to creating, maintaining and supporting process workflows across disparate systems in regards to SOA?
BEESLEY
Managing software assets is critical to us, from requirements capture through to ERP testing and deployment.
In component-based development, delivery tracking and tracing services are key to the development process. Mincom has tools in place that support a true component-based development environment which allow us to partner with other organisations, as well as buy components to complement our development capability.
BEESLEY
In your experience as an ERP vendor, what do you see as barriers for understanding the importance of SOA?
JACKMAN
A main area we see hindering understanding is the assumption that SOA is important. For the most part, C-level executives see SOA as another vendor-led bandwagon and rightly ask: “What’s in it for me?”
That scepticism is well founded because, at the moment, embracing SOA is like embracing compliance—there is a huge overhead in change management, business-process design and application integration.
SOA needs to be made seamless, ubiquitous and accessible beyond experienced business analysts and sophisticated IT teams. So widespread understanding of the benefits that SOA can bring will follow the usual path of early adopters proving something can be done, with the bulk of customers following over time as we simplify the effort, standardise connectivity options, drive down the cost, and then clearly demonstrate SOA’s usefulness.
JACKMAN
Are you finding it difficult to educate customers, and particularly smaller companies, about the benefits of service-oriented architecture?
BEESLEY
Mincom has been an advocate of component-based architecture for some time. SOA represents a maturing of enterprise standards to a level where we can now not only achieve strong interoperability within our product suite but also deliver the same level of interoperability across other products.
Customers increasingly realise that by adopting SOA and using Enterprise Application Integration infrastructure with ERP, they are able to respond more rapidly to business opportunities.
BEESLEY
Which technologies or strategies should customers look out for as “the next big thing” in the ERP space?
JACKMAN
At the micro level we believe each customer will have its own “next big thing” to work with, be it mobile access, Web transacting, supply change improvements and so on. In many ways these are evolutions that come as needs develop for customers.
At the macro level, I see a fundamental change occurring as the transactional data that ERP systems capture becomes “aware”. This comes after SOA, so we are well ahead of the curve on this. What I also mean here is that transactions have a life of their own within the business—for example, if a backorder has been idle for too long it “wakes up” and escalates itself until its status is resolved.
Making transactions aware has potential to fundamentally change how you manage your company, which I think is critical given the generational change that is happening in Australian businesses right now.
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