How SOA helps in building Interoperability, Agility, and Flexibility in mission critical systems

How SOA helps in building Interoperability, Agility, and Flexibility in mission critical systems

1. Introduction

Estimated at approximately $55 billion, the global Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) industry is set to grow at rates between 3 and 5 percent year-on-year. With modest growth rates and the global economic slowdown, reduced travel has played a large factor in increasing the cost pressures on MRO service providers in recent times. This, in turn, has forced MRO service providers to reexamine costs and increase efficiency.

One area where MRO service providers have continuously faced inefficiencies is in the area of MRO systems. With heterogeneous IT infrastructure (with respect to operating systems, applications, application infrastructure, and system software), rigid legacy systems, and little or no interoperability between these systems, MRO companies often struggle to find a way to completely leverage their IT assets.

In this paper, we will examine how a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach can serve to build composite applications to help deliver better ROI on IT investments, more specifically in work order processing.

2. Common Challenges with Systems

There are several challenges that enterprises face with existing systems. Typically, software systems end up being ‘tightly coupled’. This means that modules within the system that execute different business processes are closely interlinked with each other. As a result:

Software updates across modules can become troublesome. For example, an update to one module may inadvertently cause unexpected changes to another module.
Changes or modifications to specific modules require significant investment in terms of time and money, which is not always feasible or justified.
Reusing modules for various business processes isn’t always possible leading to greater redundancy across systems.

While tightly coupled systems present their own problems, IT strategies that are integration or application-focused create another problem because they result in purchases of numerous independent applications that do not ‘talk’ to each other.

The consequences of these limitations in business terms can be far-reaching. Enterprises are unable to respond quickly to changes in the business landscape or use existing IT infrastructure to tackle new business requirements; systems lack the capability to support new channel interactions that involve suppliers, partners, and customers; IT ends up deploying multiple systems that perform the same task; all of which lead to tremendous inefficiency within the organization.

3. Why SOA?

Most often, business demands more agility and flexibility without spending more. At the same time, IT needs resources to ensure that legacy systems are running effectively, the infrastructure is as agile and productive as possible, and required new business capabilities can be added.

Irrespective of their differences, most business and IT folks agree that an organization’s business processes differentiate them from others. And it is a focus on these business processes that can enable organizations to evolve to a more flexible goal-oriented model by pursuing an SOA approach.

In SOA, an application’s independent functions or business rules are converted into modules and presented to client or consumer applica-tions as services. This ‘loose coupling’ ensures that implementation and the service interface remain independent of each other. As a result, developers can create applications by composing one or more services even though they may not understand the underlying implementa-tions of the services.

SOA enables enterprises to seamlessly upgrade existing services or plug in new ones in a granular manner to support new business require-ments. It also adds the capability to make services accessible across different channels and exposes existing systems and applications as services to create better security for the existing IT infrastructure.

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