Ready, Steady, Stop - SOA gets in the way

Imagine your a supplier of software. You have invested in developing your software offerings over a decade or so and now you want to know how to respond to the move towards SOA among your customers. This is the problem facing a company I visited this week. They had two problems. The first is that they have several software offerings sold individually and in combination. Currently, these systems are not integrated and each time they sell a combination they hard wire them together afresh. The IT Department believes that the integration requirement is the same every time, but the implementers disagree.

The second problem is how to present themselves externally. If their customers are moving towards an SOA architecture, they are wondering if perhaps they should offer a loosely coupled integration option via web services.

The IT department is proposing that they adopt an SOA strategy and that they integrate their existing software systems using web services and offer web services as the means of integrating their products into their customers IT environments.

Unfortunately, this is a loose loose option. The first point is that adding a few web services to the existing software has nothing what ever to do with SOA. Adopting an SOA strategy would require them to re-build all their software from the ground up. Using web services simply as a means of integrating existing lumps of software is not only nothing to do with SOA's but also will not prove to be an advantage over using an EAI approach. Web services are slow and intended for inter company links where traffic volumes are low.

Unfortunately, the argument for using them for integration with the customers existing software systems is even weaker. With no advance knowledge of the system to be integrated with or how it has been implemented, it is unlikely that a pre-conceived web service will work any time let alone every time. Add to that that the traffic volumes involved are often very large and you have a recipe for disaster.

The Immediate problem for this companyis that the decision by IT adopt the use of web services and present it as an SOA strategy is blocking all attempts by the company's divisional management teams to address their immediate needs for a better way to meet their integration needs