| |
Getting Started with SOA
You're ready to leverage the innovation of service oriented architecture (SOA). You understand the benefits of modular components and web services—a simplified IT environment, linked services, enhanced business processes, and new opportunities for improvement. Now, where do you get started?
InterTech Solutions breaks down barriers to getting started with an approach that starts with the fundamental assets of your enterprise—people, information and processes. InterTech Solutions also helps to lay the technical groundwork for integration of people, processes and information by offering entry points for connectivity and reuse. Our SOA entry points can help your business pursue SOA at a pace that suits your needs.
People, process, information and IT connectivity and reuse
Any one of our five entry points can provide an effective and efficient way to get started with SOA. Click on any of the entry point names to learn more about each approach to SOA:
Business Centric
- The people entry point enables efficiency through interaction and collaboration with application and information services that support business.
- The process entry point offers tools and services to help streamline business process management for continuous innovation.
- The information entry point enables access to complex, heterogeneous data sources within your company by delivering information as a service.
IT Centric
- The connectivity entry point links people, processes and information in your business with a seamless flow of messages and information from virtually anywhere at anytime using anything.
- The reuse entry point focuses on deriving continued value from previous asset investments, identifying services to be outsourced and designing new services to fill portfolio gaps.
Which entry point makes sense for you?
There is no single answer—it depends on your business priorities and needs. Taking a business-centric approach to SOA ensures that IT investments remain focused on areas that will mean the most for the bottom line. InterTech Solutions can help you lay out an approach that's right for you and help architect a project to help you reach that goal. Get started today:
-
Talk to your InterTech Solutions representative about your business goals.
- Take a self assessment.
What is the people entry point?
Are your employees, partners, and customers enabled to take advantage of SOA to drive greater productivity and collaboration? People can interact with SOA-based business services and composite applications through an enabling framework of tools, and practices. The people entry point is a starting point for SOA, enabling people to interact with application and information services that support business processes. As a complement to the other entry points - process, information, reuse and connectivity-the people entry point can facilitate real time decision making and dynamic collaboration, and immediate execution. Overall, the people entry point approach to SOA drives business and operational flexibility and improves end-user productivity and collaboration.
The value of people
Employee productivity, operational efficiency and the ability to innovate on the fly are paramount to competitiveness and growth. Companies frequently struggle with siloed applications and information that prevent customers, employees, and partners from working together effectively. Empowering people through SOA solutions can bridge these challenges and provide a foundation for greater productivity and collaboration. Because people drive the interaction with the SOA services that execute business results, focusing on people is critical to the success of SOA implementations. The people entry strategy to SOA can help:
- Accelerate productivity
- Reduce costs for access to multiple applications and information sources.
- Reduce time to deployment for new services.
- Increase access to process flexibility and orchestration.
- Enable collaboration inside and outside the enterprise.
Get started today
A business centric approach to SOA begins with the analysis of your business to discover the areas which will most quickly benefit from improved access and interaction by people in critical business areas. For example, the people entry point would allow an end-user to access his status of an order, a service that is attached to the product order and ship core business process. Start with targeted pilot projects that give you foundational elements for expanding SOA solutions--areas to focus on include user interaction through portals and dashboards. Important design elements in a solution include:
- Contemplative user interaction design.
- Intuitive user interface to promote access to targeted information.
- A variety of deployment options across browsers and mobile devices
InterTech Solutions has market leading IBM portal and collaboration software to get you started and help accelerate your path to SOA in these areas. InterTech Solutions can help you develop a business driven strategy for SOA that focuses on improving people's interactions and collaboration from targeted service offerings.
To get started today, talk to the InterTech Solutions SOA Practice Partner about your business goals at 972-868-9165 or contact InterTech Solutions by email directly at soa@intertechinc.com.
What is the process entry point?
The process entry point is a business-centric starting point for service oriented architecture (SOA) that provides specific tools and services to help streamline and improve processes across the enterprise. By entering SOA from process vantage, you can establish the foundation for InterTech Solutions’s business process management with SOA. Improve the efficiency, flexibility, and control of key business processes.
The value of process
Do your processes allow you to quickly respond to changing market conditions? By streamlining your processes you can align your business and IT goals — reducing the complexity of building processes. Leveraging SOA with a focus on process can help your business:
- Improve employee productivity.
- Increased collaboration.
- Accelerate speed to market.
- Respond quickly to business challenges.
- Implement new processes in less time.
- Maximize return on investment.
Get started today
InterTech Solutions can help you develop a strategy for SOA that focuses on deploying innovative business models quickly with re-usable and optimized processes. Through a lifecycle approach we can help your business model underperforming processes, remove bottlenecks, then simulate and deploy the optimized process. Next, we can help you create flexible linkages between multiple processes across the enterprise and outside the firewall to suppliers and partners. Then, monitor the process to measure and track performance. The process entry point encompasses a range of software and solutions to enable people to interact with SOA including:
To get started today, talk to the InterTech Solutions SOA Practice Partner about your business goals at 972-868-9165 or contact InterTech Solutions by email directly at soa@intertechinc.com.
What is information as a service?
Information as a service is an entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) that offers information access to complex, heterogeneous data sources within your company as reusable services. These services may be available both within the enterprise and across your value chain. By entering SOA from an information vantage, you may improve the availability and consistency of information, while simultaneously removing traditional barriers to information sharing. Drive innovation by better understanding your organization’s operational, transactional, analytical, and unstructured information and making it available in new ways through SOA.
The value of information as a service
Establish information as a service to ensure consistent definitions, packaging, and governance of key business data. Provide information services that can be easily reused across processes and independently maintained to enable more business flexibility and increase IT resource productivity. The InterTech Solutions entry strategy to SOA through information can help:
Collect, clean and make your data accessible:
- Develop a unified view of their business with inline access to analytical data for improved transparency and business insight.
- Generate and govern authoritative master data records with shared metadata and data quality services for master data management.
Reduce cost and risk:
- Reduce costs associated with infrastructure rationalization and migration by decoupling information from siloed information sources.
- Reduce risk exposure through in line analytics and auditable data quality for risk and compliance initiatives.
Increase your organizations agility:
- Increase the agility for business transformation by providing reusable information services, spanning structured and unstructured information that can be plugged into applications, business processes, and portals. At the same time lower development costs associated with accessing and transforming data.
Get started today
InterTech Solutions can help you develop a strategy for SOA that focuses on information as a service. Through a lifecycle approach we can help your business capture, organize, integrate, transform, analyze, and use information to create insight within an SOA environment. Information as a service encompasses a range of software, services and solutions to address the appropriate starting point for your business:
- Information integration, enable real-time, integrated access to business information regardless of location or format by providing a broad set of information integration capabilities to semantically align information across disparate sources.
- Content management, access, protect and deliver information by building consistent and reusable services for integrated content.
- Business intelligence, IBM Data warehousing and analytics gives you the tools for powerful analysis from integrated data to derive insights that give you a competitive advantage.
- Master data management, establish consolidated "master" data for customer and product information, in both structured and unstructured formats, for a true 360% view across heterogeneous environments.
- Database services, manage, share and secure your XML or relational data using proven database management systems by embracing the emerging types of data that SOA relies on without sacrificing the reliability, performance and security of traditional formats.
- Services, leverage our experience, expertise and best practices with a full set of business consulting, architectural design and implementation services.
To get started today, talk to the InterTech Solutions SOA Practice Partner about your business goals at 972-868-9165 or contact InterTech Solutions by email directly at soa@intertechinc.com.
What is service connectivity?
Service connectivity is an IT-centric entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) designed to help simplify your IT environment with a more secure, reliable and scaleable way to connect within and beyond your business. Link people, processes and information in your business with a seamless flow of messages and information from virtually anywhere at anytime using anything — that's true connectivity. SOA brings new levels of flexibility to such linkages. Delivering real business value on its own, connectivity is also a core building block for future SOA initiatives.
The value of service connectivity
Open your doors to customers by providing a variety of ways for them to interact with your company. Enabling exceptional connectivity through your SOA you can deliver a consistent user experience regardless of what business channel they choose. Also, by linking your business units or divisions across the multiple parts of your company and your partners, you can build a foundation for success. InterTech Solutions entry strategy to SOA through service connectivity can help:
- Ensure seamless flow of information from anywhere at anytime using anything.
- Execute broad business processes that span your company and business partners.
- Build trusted relationships with your partners.
- Scale your business to grow smoothly.
- Deliver a consistent user experience regardless of channel or device.
Get started today
InterTech Solutions can help you develop a strategy for SOA that focuses on services connectivity. Through a lifecycle approach we can help you model, assemble, deploy and manage your tactical SOA-based projects to help connect your systems in a way that grows as you grow. We also can help you establish SOA governance guidelines to enhanced organizational efficiency. Service Connectivity encompasses a range of software and solutions including:
- IBM WebSphere® MQ provides a reliable messaging backbone for applications and services to help you to fully leverage your existing software and hardware.
- IBM WebSphere® Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides Web services connectivity, JMS™ messaging and service oriented integration to power your Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
- IBM WebSphere® Message Broker delivers an advanced Enterprise Service Bus providing connectivity and universal data transformation for both standard and non-standards-based applications and services to power your service-oriented architecture.
- IBM WebSphere® DataPower SOA Appliances offer an innovative, pragmatic approach to harness the power of SOA while simultaneously enabling you to leverage the value of your existing application, security, and networking infrastructure investments.
To get started today, talk to the InterTech Solutions SOA Practice Partner about your business goals at 972-868-9165 or contact InterTech Solutions by email directly at soa@intertechinc.com.
What is service creation and reuse?
Service creation and reuse is an IT-centric entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) that focuses on deriving continued value from previous asset investments, identifying services to be outsourced and designing new services to fill portfolio gaps. By entering SOA from a service creation and reuse vantage, you may expand access to proven systems and achieve greater value from your existing technology investments. In fact, a study by Software Productivity Research found that it can be up to five times less expensive to reuse existing services and applications than to rewrite them. Extend, enhance or create new processes enabling you to substantially increase business flexibility and responsiveness through reduced development time and elimination of duplicate processes.
The value of service creation and reuse
Improve efficiency. Reduce risk. Cut cost. The InterTech Solutions entry strategy to SOA through service creation and reuse can help:
- Reduce the amount of new code that must be created for business initiatives.
- Lower maintenance cost by eliminating redundant systems.
- Expedite the roll-out of new business functions by creating composite function from within your applications.
- Integrate tasks performed by your legacy applications into broader business functions to establish a simple and effective means to enhance usefulness of mainframe-based systems.
Get started today
Whether you focus on service-enabling existing assets, consuming externally available services or creating net-new services, InterTech Solutions can help you develop a strategy for SOA that focuses on services-creation and reuse. Through a lifecycle approach we can help you model, assemble, deploy and manage your tactical SOA-based projects to help deploy reused, purchased and new services into robust, flexible and scalable multiplatform run-time environments. We also establish SOA governance rules to enhanced organizational efficiency. Service creation and reuse encompasses a range of software and solutions including:
- Rational Application Developer, model-driven development for software products and systems development.
- WebSphere® Application Server, delivers the secure, scalable, resilient application infrastructure you need for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
- CICS Transaction Server, an advanced mainframe transaction processing solution that provides powerful and flexible support for On Demand Businesses.
- WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer, assists IT personnel with the maintenance, extension, reuse, and transformation of existing applications through rapid application understanding and impact analysis.
To get started today, talk to the InterTech Solutions SOA Practice Partner about your business goals at 972-868-9165 or contact InterTech Solutions by email directly at soa@intertechinc.com. |
