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SOA Migration Must Be Driven By Business Needs And Not Technology
London - 18 April 2007 - Seagull Software (AEX: SEAGULL) has unveiled a Five Point Plan for businesses to follow when migrating to Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). A key recommendation is that SOA projects are driven by business needs rather than the IT department: companies should first identify pain points and objectives, as well as the services they need to offer their end users and employees. It also urges companies to dispense of a ‘rip & replace’ mentality in favour of a 'wrap & adapt' approach to continuous software development. 
"Integration with legacy applications that do not have SOA-compliant APIs is one of the biggest issues facing enterprise IT today, which is why we've published our Five Point Plan to SOAs. It clearly shows the steps to take in order to effect business process transformation," continued Stephen Tickhill. "At the moment, SOA initiatives usually start in the IT department using new technology with little regard to business requirement. These attempts will invariably fail to deliver the full potential of SOA. The classic model for IT implementations doesn’t work. Companies first need to change their mindset: the project shouldn't be driven by the IT department - it's not a case of ripping out the old in favour of the new but of deriving and extending value from existing applications. Service is absolutely key to SOA and the organisation should ask itself 'what services do we need to offer our customers - so they can access the company effectively - and our employees - so they can do their jobs effectively?" The Seagull Software Five Point Plan to SOA 1. Identify your business pain points and the services you need to offer Identify at a business level key areas where the business needs to improve, and at an operational level what an employee needs to do his or her job. 2. Forget 'rip & replace' One of the most quantifiable benefits of moving toward an SOA is the extended value that companies can derive from existing resources. Re-use means optimising legacy software assets in order to avoid unnecessary redevelopment of functional code. Service-enablement is a means by which to abstract legacy applications from the platform for which they were originally developed and making those applications available for re-use in a flexible architecture. 3. Remember 'wrap & adapt' to service-enable underlying architecture SOA tools allow you to service-enable existing software and give users the kind of information they need, in the format they need it, on a daily basis. They allow organisations to unlock data from legacy systems, open them up to the people who most need it - across multiple sites and different organisations - and deliver the information in the format that best suits their needs. 4. Understand the technology - but don't get bogged down by it Understanding the technology of SOA is a critical part of successful deployment and key areas of consideration are: * Coding - The best way to service-enable legacy applications is a non-invasive approach where no code changes are made to the host process. A service-oriented process recovery tool will not only assist in identifying and isolating candidate functions within a legacy application but will automatically generate the service interfaces that shield prospective client processes from any platform-specific connectivity considerations. * Loose coupling - The most important design criteria for a true SOA interface is that it is 100 per cent abstracted from the actual technology utilised to implement the service – leading to what is called loose coupling. 5. Adopt a staged approach to SOA The staged approach enables an enterprise to ease into SOA by starting with the service-enablement of a few key existing business processes and then gradually building a portfolio of business services for reuse. In addition to the immediate business benefits of exposing time-tested processes for service-orientated integration, this method provides a relatively inexpensive, low-risk SOA learning as well. Seagull Software's roadmap to SOA migration reflects knowledge gained in supporting the legacy liberation requirements of over 8,000 customers globally. UK customers include HMRC, Milton Keynes Council, UTI and Verizon.
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