Integration Spotlight: Is Service-Oriented Integration Right for You?

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By now, anyone interested in integrated business processes has heard about service-oriented architecture (SOA), which leading industry analysts and software vendors alike hype as the silver bullet for business systems integration.

In my worldwide talks on service-oriented integration, I am bombarded by questions regarding the service-oriented approach toward business systems integration. Questions like, Is SOA real or simply the buzzword du jour in a world saturated with integration software technologies? What can SOA and the new generation of service-oriented integration tools do for me? What are the bottom-line business benefits of taking an SOA approach toward implementing integration?

The answers to such questions can be rather complex. There is no single approach or integration software technology that is a one-size-fits-all solution to every business integration challenge. Nevertheless, service-oriented integration architecture and the new software tools that implement SOA principles are beginning to show bottom-line benefits in terms of reducing the time, cost and complexity of integrating operational business processes – as well as dramatic results in return on investment.

Many iWay customers are meeting the challenge head-on, implementing integration solutions using a service-oriented approach and iWay integration tools, and are finding that today's enterprise application integration technologies do not adequately address the two most fundamental issues of business process integration:

1. EAI tools place the burden of know-how squarely upon the shoulders of application and integration implementers with regard to having to know how to navigate and manipulate the information resources (typically databases and applications) being integrated. Application and integration implementers simply don't know how to navigate and manipulate resources such as SAP, PeopleSoft, CICS transaction systems and legacy applications in order to make an integrated business process work.
2. EAI tools still focus primarily on providing the tools necessary to implement the low-level programming tasks necessary to interface with and manipulate information resources. Complex integration scenarios should simply be a matter of assembly, not custom-coding.

SOA and tomorrow's service-oriented integration technologies, such as iWay, seek to address these two fundamental problems: taking the know-how out of the hands of application and integration implementers and putting it where it belongs, in the hands of the experts that maintain the business enterprises' operational information resources. Additionally, SOA integration software provides the means to create and deploy powerful integration services that may be assembled into integrated business processes – rather than custom-programming each and every integration scenario.

So, the next time you try to build a portal application that needs to "reach out and touch" back-end resources such as SAP, CICS, or worse, that legacy system nobody remembers how to interface with – or attempt to build an integrated supply chain process that touches several of your operational systems – rather than throwing up your hands and saying, "It can't be done without spending a ton of money," or just handing it all to some expensive system integration expert and saying, "You worry about it"…think SOA. SOA and SOA-oriented integration software products such as iWay can have a dramatic impact in terms of reducing the immensity of integration challenges. Some of iWay's best customers are already doing it today and are very willing to share their experiences with you.