Recession Proof Agile SOAUsing Quick Turns for Quick FeedbackBy Brad Brown

Executive Summary

The goal of this paper is to help you, the reader, understand why Agile Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) will make your efforts successful. Service-orientation / SOA is not best implemented in a waterfall effort. Long, large projects are killers especially in tough economic times. The quicker you can show success, the quicker you’ll win those new projects, get more business, save money, and achieve whatever your goals may be. The Agile process allows for quick wins through quick turns. Quick turns will give you rapid feedback and allow you to change as your requirements come together or change. It’s also important to know that our approach is a “best of breed” approach to SOA. In other words, you don’t need to pick an entire technology stack day one, rather iPerspectiveTM

(Rolta’s technology) provides you an incremental approach that let’s you get going today with the technology stack that you already have and then the option to build from there.

Agile is a development methodology that’s not Rapid Application Development (RAD), not Extreme Programming (XP) or anything like that; it involves releases of the entire software through iterations. The whole idea is to allow the business to work with IT, to see the results, provide feedback, etc. Note a couple of the important terms above, such as quick turns and quick feedback. Traditional SOA has been done in a waterfall method and achieved no value when code was rewritten just for the sake of re-writing. In other words, there is no direct value

in SOA. The value comes in how SOA is used. With SOA you get to re-use existing assets. SOA might allow a company to do some new things, like mashups, application to application integration or a new workflow.

The ability to rapidly modify service offerings is becoming a key to success in today's turbulent economy. Many companies are turning to SOA to help their business reduce development efforts and achieve agility, but implementing SOA effectively has proved a daunting challenge all its own. How can today's IT managers and CIOs realistically propose SOA and quickly deliver benefits without risking their jobs?

This paper will explain why historic SOA implementations have failed, how you can benefit from innovative software that fundamentally transforms the complexity of implementing SOA to an "instant" task and how an Agile, iterative approach can deliver rapid Return on Investment (ROI) for your business and ultimately lower total cost of ownership. In a time where budgets can be cut at a moment's notice, this paper aims to ensure you derive value from your SOA initiatives in weeks and bring real impact to your business.

Introduction

First, let’s talk about our Agile SOA methodology and then we will share some case studies on how organizations generate revenues quickly, get feedback from users, and ultimately save time and money. We will also provide some

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background on SOA, our Agile approach and how you can use Agile and iPerspective to give you quick turns, which will result in quick wins. This is our BeTteR process (build, try, retry), so let’s get started.

Topics in this paper include: Introduction to Service Orientation Agile, Agile, Agile Quick Turns (with iPerspective) BeTteR process Build, Try, Revise

Slaying Daemons and Ghosts

We all have daemons and ghosts that keep us up at night. What is that keeps you up at night? For me it is cash flow and collections. I’ve been in business for myself since I was about 10 years old starting with a job delivering newspapers and collecting weekly, leading all the way to starting TUSC, which what was a $50M business in 2006. I can assure you that cash flow became a concern when I was 10. People didn’t answer their door when I rang the bell, and that was just for their $1.40 a week newspaper. When it comes to the days you are collecting $50M in revenue, Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) increases. Each day equates to $140K and at 10% interest, that’s a net annual cost of $14K in interest per DSO. That adds up to a lot of money in no time! So if you can reduce your DSO, you can really improve your cash flow and profitability. Cash flow is a daemon for most every business.

Perhaps your ghost is staff reductions. Has your firm cut “fat” and then “muscle” and you’re now into the bone? What’s next? I have been there. This situation forces everyone to pick up more and more and it can become overwhelming. It beats the alternative of being unemployed.

Then there is the uncertainty and risk of it all. When will we hit the bottom? If we knew that, we could do a perfect pro-forma and figure out exactly what to cut and when, but it’s not that simple, is it? So how do you survive? When will the economy turn? Are we at the bottom now? Obviously, the more you can save and the faster you can save it, the longer you can hold out before you have to make any cuts. The more you cut into the muscle and bone of your organization, the longer it will take you to recover. The greatest time of opportunity is when the market recovers. That’s when there is a shortage of firms in business and that’s when the profit margins are at their highest. You will far exceed your losses in gains, but only if you survive. So it is a tightrope that we all balance.

The faster you can learn from your users, the more you’ll be ahead of the curve. The way you can accomplish this is with quick wins! If you can support an Agile enterprise, it will streamline your enterprise.

How long does it take you from the time you have a great new idea until you can actually see results? The Agile approach plus the technology advances embedded in iPerspective support code iterations in just a couple weeks in comparison to traditional SOA projects that can take months. I will discuss more on project timeline shortly.

The bottom line is that long projects won’t fly when you’re trying to save money, quick wins are the key!

What keeps you up at night? Cash flow in a declining world economy? Efficiency: doing more after cutting into

the “muscle?” Uncertainty and risk? Surviving until the recovery?

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How to position for the recovery? Increase your organizations ability to

learn faster and implement IT application changes more quickly.

Institute agile and streamline enterprise processes.

Service-oriented Solutions

“Most midsize and large software projects target a service-oriented software model. Service-oriented applications are modular, and the modules (services and clients) are loosely coupled, shareable and distributable, and are encapsulated behind separately documented programmatic interfaces. Support of such architecture requires a multifunctional, underlying application infrastructure technology often assembled by users from products of potentially different vendors. Some users prefer a best-of-breed approach to selecting their enabling technologies, although this approach requires users to act as system integrators (SIs) in assembling the end-to-end enabling platform for the project.” – Gartner, #G00163409

In the past we were very technology oriented. I am sure you remember terms like “re-engineering”, which drove many businesses to adapt their business process into the technology. This proved to be difficult and not very beneficial, although we may have thought differently at the time. Companies moved to Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) implementations because it was better for them to purchase software than it was for them to write it. You might ask, who would write a database software package? I can’t tell you how many order entry or ERP applications I wrote over my career. People customized Oracle Applications to no end in the early days. Then we learned that practice was a bad idea; most of

us learned the hard way. I was on a project in the early 90s where the ERP customization had been in progress for years. When the next version of Oracle Apps came out, “customizations” killed everyone.

Now we are service-oriented. Someone recently said to me “this SOA thing isn’t anything new.” That’s true, it’s really not, but someone else summed it up very well, “SOA is really just a bunch of best practices of best practices.” In other words, just because you put a SOA in place doesn’t mean you can’t screw it up. In my early SOA efforts, governance (i.e. operational excellence) wasn’t discussed, so we learned those best practices the hard way. SOA can easily put components of the architecture right into the heartbeat of a company. I recently talked to one of our DBAs who mentioned that a customer had all of their services running through one DB box that was processing 3500 transactions per second; therefore, they could afford ZERO downtime. That’s risky! I’d venture to say that’s not a best practice. And they are an SOA shop.

Service orientation gives you an open Application Programming Interface (API) to your business, data and business processes which is platform independent and technology independent. We are not technology oriented any more.

SOA provides you with an open standard API to your entire business. That’s service-orientation!

Technology-oriented (then): Traditional business applications – “one-

size-fits-all” Business processes created to utilize

technology “Re-engineering”

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Service-oriented (now): Standard information and process

“services” that can be mixed and matched to solve business problems in a standard, reliable, flexible and efficient way.

Technology created to serve business purposes

Business Intelligence, Business Process Management

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Benefits of Service-Oriented IT

The benefits of service orientation are real. Imagine having an open standard API for your entire business. Any system can communicate with any other system transparently. So rather than moving and copying data throughout your organization, you can get the data from the system of record (single source of the truth) when you need it. Traditionally we have replicated data throughout our organizations. Copies of data everywhere can lead to stale data throughout. I was at a government facility the other day and they said, “we have access to yesterday’s information, but not today’s.” They are making decisions about people’s lives with day old data!

There is no need to re-invent the wheel or re-write your systems. You have years of development in your existing business logic. In fact, in many organizations the person who wrote the original code has been gone for 10 years now. It’s a black box. Or you might have a packaged application (i.e. COTS) that you don’t have the source code for. Nearly every COTS provider makes it clear that if you modify their source code, you won’t be supported. They also make it clear that if you put data into their database without going through their APIs, you will not be supported.

Well, the good news is that unlike historical architectures that required a re-write to implement, SOA allows you to re-use your existing data and business logic, i.e. wrap it. This is a first!

This sounds like a great concept, but as you study SOA, you will quickly say that you don’t want to expose everything you have today as a service (i.e. programs are too granular or “fine

grained”) to be useful in their raw form. Composite services allow you to combine services into larger (i.e. “course grained”) services. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes allow you to orchestrate services (i.e. put workflow around services), even granular services via Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI), which is fast. Organizations refer to the reuse of existing logic as “Legacy modernization.” Clearly this is efficient for your organization. The benefits of legacy moderation are that you’ll have no new spend for these services, no new training is required and it will meet your regulatory requirements.

If you implement a service orientation using Agile, you are able to accommodate changes quickly! If you remember programming 101, it’s best to make one change, then test it out fully, rather than changing 20 things and trying to get your program to work. SOA is the same way – rather than developing 20 services at once, you can use Agile with short iterations and releases.

Would you also like to be able to build services as you prioritize them and as the business is changing? It’s similar to Just in Time (JIT) inventory. This is Just in Time Web Services!

Some people save money by using rapid feedback with end users. Others use it to quickly demonstrate what can be done with the services and then leave it to their Business to Business (B2B) customers to develop their own User Interface (UI) when customers ask for functionality beyond their out of the box UI. So they save money by not having to do the UI enhancements or workflow development themselves, rather they drive it out to their customers.

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If you can put some predictability in your service orientation efforts, you’ll be able to ultimately reduce your risk. It’s pretty simple! This strategy will position you for the recovery by building your corporate knowledge one service at a time, not literally one service per iteration, but you get the idea. This provides for continuous improvement. Services will be used and re-used; which encourages and supports information sharing!

Reuse of assets will drive efficiency and Agile makes it fast to see the results:

Consistency across enterprise: Single source of truth Reuse and efficiency “Legacy modernization” Agile – accommodates change One vs. many access points Predictability in order to reduce risk

Position for the recovery by building corporate knowledge:

Continuous improvement based on multi-use

Encourages and supports information sharing

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

There are a lot of components to a complete SOA stack. The good news is that you don‘t have to build your entire stack on day one. You likely already have your computing and network components as well as your business applications. SOA is built around everything you have today, even the existing services. SOA is an architecture, not a product you buy. (We have more information on the stack, building the stack, governance, and more. If you are interested in learning more about the stack and how these pieces fit together, please send

us an email or give us a call as we would be happy to talk to you more about this.)

The good news is iPerspective either fits into your existing stack or we give you a complete stack. It‘s your call.

The SOA Train is Here!

Gartner has something they call the hype cycle, which is a cycle that they say every new technology goes through. People get excited about new technology very quickly. Take Twitter for example. I’m thinking it has to be at the top of the hype cycle, and that it will soon crash. Once people get beyond the hype and get back to reality, the technology tends to hit a new low, then slowly rebuilds. Your interest in SOA or any other technology will depend on what part of the curve you’re comfortable implementing. If you’re an early adaptor, you missed the curve for SOA, but cloud computing might be more up your alley right now. SOA has passed the hype cycle and is into the safe zone. So at this point you are not an early adaptor, nor a late adaptor,

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you are entering in the “just right” phase. Your time might be now.

For internal sales we are past the early adaptor stage. It is time for others now.

SOA Utilization

IDC took a look at services within organizations that were using SOA to figure out what categories their services fell into. If we focus on a few service categories, we quickly notice that 58% of the services either wrap an existing interface, query, update data or perform data transformation. We are going to come back to our technology that supports our methodology in a minute, but the circled categories are easily created using iPerspective. You’ll get to see more about this in a minute.

The circled ways companies are using services are what iPerspective does immediately. It’s 58% of the picture out of the box. We have other services, such as security and event notification services as well.

SOA Is Alive and Well!

The Burton group did a great job of exciting the SOA world and creating viral hype for the community by saying SOA is dead – brilliant! But it is not dead. Long live services, but monolithic, top-down, waterfall SOA projects; yes, those are dead. Who can afford to wait 2 years to see the results of something you start today? Nobody can. The business changes way too much in 2 years. In times like today, 2 months is too long!

As I discussed above, legacy modernization, i.e. using your existing assets, is key. There is a shortage of skills and talent within most every organization today. Most adaptors of SOA said it was a challenge to support a HUGE SOA initiative. iPerspective answers that challenge by automatically taking care of complexity and removing the need to know new programming languages and paradigms in order to exploit the advantages of SOA.

SOA is not dead, but as I mentioned above, SOA alone does not give you ROI.

Monolithic, top-down, waterfall approaches have not worked for the following reasons:

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Multi-year implementations No significant ROI Cultural turmoil

Burton Group: “SOA is dead”!? According to Burton Group in 2008, SOA

initiatives have stalled out in some cases: o The techies have not been able to

explain to the business units why they should adopt a better attitude about information sharing and collaboration. This can be a fundamental cultural shift that is required for SOA to succeed. The pervasive attitude is “What is in it for me?”

Burton Group is wrong! Service-oriented is very much alive!

iPerspective automates and requires no new skills!

Comparison of SOA Approaches

The Rolta TUSC approach or methodology empowers rich customer interactions through Agile SOA.

We believe that: SOA should be delivered in days, not

months or years. Agility is the ability to be flexible, quickly;

this is critical in both your approach and technology benefits.

Simplicity and delivering rapid value are paramount.

There is a better way to deliver SOA Today.

Traditional and technology-oriented approaches take too long, require the business to wait as technology is updated and lack agility. Agile is by far the most productive development methodology I

have ever experienced. We use it for all of our internal product development.

Our approach utilizes an iterative process, small projects and quick ROI.

Agile, Agile, Agile

What a great segway for Agile. Let’s talk about our agile-based development methodology. Keep in mind, Agile can be part of the entire cycle, not just development. In other words, it is part of the design process, testing, everything.

Agile Provides QUICK Results

The advantage of Agile is that it provides rapid results. A release is a group of iterations, and an iteration is a short period in which you’ll complete an entire cycle of design to development. In this process many things occur concurrently rather than in serial. This is part of the power of Agile. Additionally, the cycles are short. Internally, we initially did 1 week iterations. We later moved from 1 week to 2 week iterations. So every 2 weeks we are determining which features we are going to build into our product and at the end of the 2 weeks, we have an official release of the product. We do bi-daily builds of the entire product. One

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build is for the US developers and the other is for our team in India. Since we tend to be developing nearly 24x7, the builds are really for everyone; anything that’s checked in, gets built. The build is automatically checked to make sure the primary functionality is working. Good builds are automatically deployed to all test servers. Each day the test team gets to work on the latest and greatest build! If you have a new feature that MUST make it into the product, how long will it be before you actually get to see it? For us, it is from 2 to 4 weeks. Technically it could be within 12 hours (in the next build). With our Agile methodology, you can produce results quickly! Agile is not for the weak or meek. It will accentuate your flaws.

In the construction industry, we say we “stacked the deck” with contractors (i.e. when you bring in the drywall, paint, carpet and other trades in all on top of each other). That is pretty much what Agile does as well. The product management team is determining the priorities (i.e. for specific stories) for the next iteration, while the design team is estimating stories in Small, Medium and Large size chunks. The teams then meet to determine which stories will be included in the iteration, and the process goes on from there.

If a developer runs out of things to do, there is a constant backlog of stories (i.e. what we should work on next, etc.). This is powerful! You can’t achieve results like this in a waterfall project.

Again, quick iterations are key and we have not avoided design, unlike RAD or XP. You’re stacking the deck like in contracting.

Agile: Has short iterations allowing your

customer to see what they are asking for quickly.

Does not imply a lack of design, rather it’s more like stacking the deck.

Provides a constant backlog of “ready to develop” tasks.

The Agile Scrum

The figure below is a look at our Agile process / methodology. As I mentioned, you have a constant product backlog with prioritized features desired by customers. These stories feed into an iteration or sprint. Iterations feed into a release. On a daily basis the team meets to review what was completed yesterday, what will be done today and what obstacles stand in your way. We have about 30 people on our team globally. Our typical scrum meeting takes about 15-20 minutes a day. I am not a meeting person, in fact I really dislike meetings, but attend every scrum meeting I can, and I actually enjoy them. It is a great snapshot of what everyone’s working on. There is no hiding in an Agile process. If you’re not cutting it you’ll know quickly! The output of an iteration is a potentially shippable product increment (i.e. a release). At the end of the sprint, we demo all of the new features and do a retrospective on the sprint and ask questions like, “what can we improve?” I really like this process and I know you will too!

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“Two Pillars” of Scrum

There are 2 pillars of the scrum; team empowerment and adaptability. I’ve worked on projects where the project manager said, “you have 16 hours to complete the task.” And I’ve thought, huh? That’s not possible, or there’s more than you think is here, or the more I dig, the more I find. The beauty of this process is that you can adapt to changes when they occur.

Agile does not fix the issues; it highlights them in a HUGE way so that businesses can be empowered and change!

Team Empowerment: Once teams are given work to do, they

are responsible for figuring out how to do it.

The team does their best during each increment.

While a team works, their only interaction with management is to tell management what is getting in their way and what needs to be removed to improve their productivity.

Adaptability: Scrum uses "punctuated equilibrium".

The team maintains an equilibrium during each increment, insulated from outside disturbance.

Increments are punctuated at the end of every sprint so that the team and management can evaluate what should be done during the next increment. This decision is based on what the team has accomplished and what the business dictates is the next most important thing to do.

Once Scrum is underway, teams and management find it easy to focus. Every request is easily evaluated by, "How does the request support delivering the code?"

Sprinting

I have provided a sample sprint planning meeting agenda in the following diagram. On the left, you can see how detailed the “chunks” of work are based on the stage it is in. For example, you will likely know items that you want to accomplish in the next release; for example rework UI. You might have huge undertakings that are required after the next release, such as developing an end user workbench. From there you can see that the closer the stories are to the current sprint, the smaller the items are. For the current sprint, every task needs to be outlined and it must be VERY detailed!

This graphic shows how things go from concepts down to tasks. But the design is constant. We spend an entire day or two at the beginning of every iteration / sprint on design.

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Sample Sprint Agenda: Opening, Welcome, Intros, Agenda Product Vision & Roadmap Development Status, Architecture,

Previous Sprint Velocity In Previous Sprints Team – Availability and Capacity “Done” Review Definition Product Backlog: Review and Select Tasking Out – Estimates – Ownership Challenges – Dependencies – Risks Review: Capacity Required Review: Risks & Mitigations COMMIT! Parking Lot, Action Items Close

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The BeTteR Process

Our BeTteR process is an Agile SOA methodology which will be discussed below.

TUSC’s SOA Guide: the BeTteR Methodology

This methodology reduces risk. It also ends up taking far less time to get to your final solution. It is really a very simple, yet effective approach. Using our iPerspective technology, you can develop services within minutes. It is literally as simple as exposing existing data or business logic or writing new business logic (i.e. courser granularity) or data logic (i.e. a SQL query or a view). Using Agile and iPerspective, we build a service and then the end user can see what is built using rapid prototyping and tools like Oracle Application Express or one of the many service consuming product. In other words, they get to try it out. Then we revise the functionality based on the feedback loop, which results in building new services and so on. This FAST feedback loop accomplishes the goals in the diagram.

Build, then try, get feedback and revise – quick turns. This is only possible because of iPerspective capability to quickly generate services!

BeTteR process: Reduces risk Shorter time-to-solution Simple approach Built-in precision tuning

With iPerspective: Build services in minutes Manage services Flexibly Ease of process

Flexible Deployment and Fast ROI

On the bottom of the following figure, you will see all of your applications, business logic and data throughout your organization. On the top, you will notice those service consuming products (i.e. mashups, mobile applications, application to application integration, workflow processes, etc.). In the middle you have your services. iPerspective exposes those existing assets as business services.

iPerspective is effectively a middleware. It connects your applications to your consuming

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applications. It supports mashups, application to application, or workflows. It creates Web Services. iPerspective provides for flexible deployment, which results in fast ROI.

Rolta TUSC: Your SOA Guide

With Agile SOA, you can create quick turns between your business and IT groups. This positions you to provide efficiency, reduce risk, and provide corporate learning to your company. We have a number of service offerings around SOA. These start with what we call SOA Today and move up the chain from there. iPerspective is our software solution that allows for these quick turns. We would love to help you through your SOA journey, no matter where you are on that journey. Some people are still trying to validate whether SOA is real. They might be trying to understand why there is value in SOA, and we have customers who have been doing SOA for 5 years. Let’s talk a little more about SOA Today, just in case you’re on the early part of the SOA learning curve.

We also have services wrapped around our technology. We can start at education (SOA Today), a roadmap, an assessment, etc. We have a complete line of SOA services.

SOA can fight your fears and position you well for the economic recovery by giving you:

Efficiency Risk reduction Corporate learning

Rolta TUSC is your SOA Guide to success! SOA Today - Fast transformation to

service-oriented IT SOA Advisory, Technical, Architectural

and Innovation Services - Optimizing your enterprise operations

iPerspective - Linking your services to your business needs

Gaining Early, Lasting Buy-in

SOA Today is our starting point for SOA. It starts with the workshop that you see in the upper left hand quarter of the next diagram. This is where we talk about your requirements and what you are trying to accomplish. The next step is the bootcamp, which is where we apply the requirements to the principles of SOA. From there we go into visioning once you know your requirements and the principles of SOA, so we can work together to figure out the roapmap for your first release of services. In the jumpstart we will develop 2-5 services after a comprehensive design and architecture review. The process is iteriative, so it just keeps going from there.

This next figure shows SOA Today and what it typically includes:

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Let us talk about iPerspective more now.

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iPerspective

As I mentioned, iPerspective is our technology that enables our Agile SOA methodology. iPerspective makes all of your data and business logic look like Web Services and PeriscopeTM makes all of your data look like it’s in an Oracle database. In other words, both are virtualization technologies. They make non-common platforms operate in a homogenous environment.

Periscope

Periscope is our technology that turns any service into a query. In other words, you can query from a Web Service as if the data is coming from your database.

Imagine for a minute if you had the ability to write a query from a Web service. I am calling this “Service as a Query” or “Query from a Service” or “Query Service” for short.

For example, let’s say you wanted to write a query against a Web service from http://www.thomas-bayer.com/ that contains an operation called getBank. The service contains a bank ID (biz).

select bankName, bankId, location, plzfrom thomas_bayer_bank_servicewhere biz = 20041133

Powerful, right? Absolutely! Or let’s say you want to query from http://www.abundanttech.com/ “dead or alive” service and call the getTodaysBirthdays operation (that has no parameters):

select * from todays_birthdays

Or let’s say you used Yahoo Pipes to pull Oracle’s current stock price and then you want to query from a RESTful service to get this information - now:

select current_stock_price, link, detailsfrom yahoo_pipe_oracle

Or what if you want to query from Google:

select *from googlewhere searchString = ‘Bradley D. Brown’

Web Services allow you to run a program on another server as if it’s on the same server. You don’t need to know the operating system, the

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hardware platform, the programming language or much of anything about the source system. You simply run the program on another server. That is what a Web Service is. Just think about the power of being able to query from any data source as if that data is in your own database. That’s what I call a Query Service!

Rolta’s iPerspective product allows you to quickly expose your existing business logic and data as Web Services. As discussed below, iPerspective adds key features to your service deployment. Rolta’s Periscope product gives you Query Service functionality right out of the box. You can query from any Web Service with a simple SQL Query! Imagine the power of this type of functionality. Any product that uses a JDBC driver can now query from any Web Service as if the data is on the same system. That is powerful!

Differentiators

Here are some of the key iPerspective differentiators:

Federated (i.e. cross DB) queries Security

o Add a digest, LDAP, single sign-on layer on top of services – with the click of a button

All different bindings of the WSDL (i.e. old formats to new)

Release management - Grouping of objects into different releases of services

A repository of your services o i.e. a complete stack all in one

Extended object support – We support a lot of things that JDev didn’t in the past – i.e. overloaded functions in a package, record types, and MANY, MANY more – basically any Oracle ERP package/API can be turned into a service

Dynamic service - We have a service type that allows you to call it and pass in your SQL statement and we have security options that allow you to restrict what objects can be used. You can lock down the gateway or allow the service to accept this and you can pass in a federated query as well.

Virtual private service - ability to provide access to a service that gives a customer only their data

ApEx, Sensedia and UDDI support - We deploy our service repository to a number of other repositories.

RESTful services - with a click, you can make your release a RESTful release.

Auto deployment - we can deploy to 1 server or 100 at a time.

Open Adaptor API – we have an open API for Security, Gateways. Code generation.

Open Architecture Model for iPerspective

iPerspective is the middle man between your data or business logic and your consumers. Data meaning databases, files, etc. Business logic meaning code that you’ve already written. By consumers I mean the technology that will use your existing data and business logic. These include mashups or dashboards, workflow, BPEL processes and applications that will integrate to other applications.

iPerspective is built on open technology and it is an open architecture as well. What does this mean for you? If it is built on open technology, why not just go out and download all of the open source technologies on your own? Well, they have shortcomings and they are difficult to pull together. We’ve done the hard work for you.

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You might ask “what do you mean by an ‘open architecture’?” iPerspective provides open APIs to allow you to add new functionality to it. If you want to interface to some data source that we don’t support today; it is easy to do so.

iPerspective sits between the source data, the business logic and the consumers, it also includes security. iPerspective is flexible because it has an open architecture. You can add your own data sources, gateways, code generators, security, etc.

Your Guide Along the SOA Adoption Path

I have been talking about Agile SOA, which is an iterative method of working with the business and IT to develop services that provide for the business. In other words, in using our methodology you are building an optimized business with assets you already own! Not all at once and not over night, but via releases over time. This is powerful.

Let’s talk about how some customers have implemented our methodology and software.

You can see in the following figure that we recommend implementing services in iterations.

Real World Examples

We’re going to take a look at some real world examples now.

Bombay Stock ExchangeLegacy Modernization

First, let’s talk about a Periscope example. The Bombay Stock Exchange uses Periscope and they have a lot of data on Stratus platforms. They wanted to do ad-hoc reporting on that data. But there were no tools like Cognos, Brio, etc. that would work on those platforms. Periscope makes the Stratus data appear as if it’s Oracle data in an Oracle database. So any tool that can access Oracle can report on the Stratus data. This simplifies life for the exchange.

Exchange: Stratus system – high uptime

requirements Ad hoc reporting through Periscope Simplified access and control/auditing

IntelliReal

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B2B Integration

One of our customers is in the real estate intelligence business. We created a number of services around existing business logic and data. The services were initially used to develop a UI that was used by most of their customers. When customers asked for customization of the UI, our customer would be able to offer everything they saw in the UI, and this was simply a service that they could use as they saw fit. The B2B customers would then use the exact same services to develop their own user interfaces, workflow processes or integrate applications. What you see here are examples of how different companies used the exact same data.

The beauty of building services was that we could use our own services for the UI.

In this first figure, you can see that this is from the IntelliReal site. You enter an address and pick your report type. This calls the respective service that often generates a PDF or returns data.

After entering an address and requesting a detailed online report, the user can see a list of objects that exist for this property.

The following figure is a PDF that is generated when a user requests an Intelligent Property Report. One service returns the data for this PDF and another service formats the data and generates a PDF. This way, customers can call the data service if they wish to generate a similar report in a different format.

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The following figure shows a heat map that is displayed using Google Maps. Another service returns this data to the customer so they can display it as they wish. You’ll see an example of how a customer used this market volatility data to generate their own report.

The figure below shows the geosearch functionality. Via Google Maps all of the homes in a neighborhood are displayed and then can be sliced and diced as the user sees fit. For

example, the user can see the data by the number of bedrooms in a home or the style of home, acreage and the like.

The next figures all represent ways that different customers used the same data as the figure above. They call the same services that IntelliReal uses internally and then they graph the data however they choose. For example, you can see that this page shows a simple Google map for a property and a few details about the property.

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Another vendor had their own mapping package to display the data on a map. You can see they displayed an index, range for the property value and so forth.

As I mentioned above, IntelliReal displayed the market volatility data in a heat map. This customer wanted to graph the data for a specific property and then put it into a table at the bottom.

In the last figure you can see that this customer used Microsoft Virtual Earth, and again, wanted to display the information in a different format.

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Financial MarketsOne View of the Customer, Real Time Updates and Basel II

The financial markets are a great example of a business that requires SOA to comply with federal regulations. I think of Basel II as the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) of the banking world. One of the Basel II requirements is that a bank be capable of pulling together everything about a customer within one minute. In other words, a bank requires a 360 degree view of a customer. We all know that we have customer data in a number of systems throughout our organizations. You can see that this financial institution has a number of databases and data warehouses.

Using iPerspective and our Agile SOA methodology a company can quickly pull this information together from any number of systems. This also provides for a big payoff when the business changes, like when adding a new acquisition. Having a service architecture in place will reduce the complexity for these institutions.

Some of the SOA Winners include Wells Fargo, Capital One and JP Morgan Chase.

Non-SOA losers: Citibank, Wachovia, WAMU

Healthcare Illustration of Value

Healthcare is an industry that is screaming for a service oriented architecture. For example, healthcare facilities are spending millions of dollars in the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems in order to ultimately save hundreds of millions of dollars. However, there’s a gap in the plan; only 4% of doctors say they will use the EMR. Why? They say things like “it takes too much time, it’s too hard to use, how does it benefit them?” By working with the doctors to discover their needs and preferences, we can increase the use of EMR, helping hospitals realize their planned savings! Again, our iterative Agile approach is key.

In other words, bringing Electronic Medical Records systems together with other hospital systems provides a huge value to the physicians and nurses. Specifically the business intelligence can be used to drive down cost and improve quality. The CRM data can be used to track insurance and treatments along with other items such as reimbursements, care tracking from start to finish, clinical decision support, inter-organizational system integration, telemedicine for rural healthcare, support for medical tourism and transient patients. Integrated care is an additional benefit.

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Roadmap: Global Services Utility Provider

Another example of how a company might use iPerspective is in the cloud computing world. iPerspective allows you to expose your data and business logic as services. Cloud computing allows you to run your own software on someone else’s hardware. In other words it combines SaaS and HaaS. You cannot do cloud computing without SOA. The numerous advantages of cloud computing are listed here: lowering overhead by reducing capital costs and depreciation, increased accessibility to your systems throughout the world (it simplifies outsourcing globally too), added flexibility to turn servers on and off at the bat of an eye and increased scaling and redundancy by distributing your servers.

Illustration of the BeTteR process

We are working in a number of verticals and we have demos geared specific for each vertical. We would love to show you our Agile SOA process in your industry. We can offer you a great illustration of our BeTteR process. In 5 minutes or less, we will demonstrate the creation of a set of secure services and consume them. We like to show off Oracle’s Application Express, but we also have demos using other consumption or mashup technologies. You will see how you will be able to create buy-in from your line of business managers very quickly. After all, it’s all about serving the needs of the business as quickly as possible!

In minutes, create a service to securely access a database

Resources for projects – who is / will be certified inside your company

Resources that are Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED Certified

Show the result of that service in an Oracle Application Express application

Create buy-in from your Line-of-Business Managers

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Revise quickly to fit the business needs such as adding data from one of your preferred contractors.

Influencing people to change by showing them immediate value

Transform your organization to be service-oriented!

Summary

The bottom line is that by using our Agile SOA methodologies and technology, you will be able to deliver results faster and more inline with the business requirements. Our BeTteR process is an iterative SOA process. The end result for you and your business is quick wins as a result of quick turnaround. Like in the book “Who Moved My Cheese”; when the customers change, you need to look for cheese in a new location. In other words, the business needs to be able to respond quickly. The faster you’re able to move and experiment, the better off you’ll be. As they say in the baseball world, the more “at bats” you get the more runs you will have, even with a batting average of 300.

Agile delivers results faster and more inline with the business

BeTter is better

Quick results = quick wins

Credit

Thanks to Hubert Smits, Agile instructor for Rally Software for the Agile graphics

About the AuthorBradley D. Brown

Bradley D. Brown is Chief Technology Officer of Rolta TUSC. Thomas Kurian, senior vice president, Oracle Server Technologies Division, says, "Brad is among the foremost experts on Oracle's technology in the world."

Brad’s blog can be found at http://www.tuscsoftware.com/brown.

For Brad, Web development isn't a job, it is his passion. He is the Oracle expert who technologists around the world turn to when they seek expertise and experience in that discipline. Oracle Application Server, Oracle Application Express, Web Services, and the Service Oriented Architecture are only a few of the technologies he has mastered over a career that spans more than 25 years.

"Oracle HTML DB Handbook" (the product was renamed Oracle Application Express) is the fifth book that Brad has published through Oracle Press and Osborne/McGraw-Hill. His most recent contribution was "Oracle Application Server 10g" which was co-authored with TUSC Technical Management Consultant Christopher Ostrowski in 2004. Prior to that, in 2001 Brad combined his many years of experience into "Oracle9i Web Development," which was a follow-up to "Oracle8i Web Development" he released two years before that. Brad's debut in the publishing industry came with "Oracle

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Application Server Web Toolkit Reference" in 1997.

While Brad is primarily recognized as an accomplished Oracle author and world-renowned speaker, it is his technological expertise that clearly is his identity. While he has enjoyed a countless number of major implementation successes over the years, one milestone that clearly stands out centers around the development of "Periscope" which he released through TUSC in 2002. Periscope is breakthrough software that makes data from other data sources (i.e., Microsoft Access, Sybase, SQL Server, DB2, Web Services, file systems, APIs, etc.) appear as if it's in one big Oracle Database. The data also can be inserted, updated and deleted from many source databases. The groundbreaking tool works with more than 100 databases.

In 2008, Brad took Periscope and Oracle virtualization to a new level with Rolta-TUSC's iPerspective product. iPerspective allows companies to expose data (i.e. tables and views) and programs (i.e. packages, procedures, and functions) that already exist within organizations as Web Services. iPerspective provides for database virtualization into the service oriented architecture. Traditional migrations from terminal host to thick client applications, then from thick client to thin client were painful migrations (i.e. complete re-writes). iPerspective allows companies to move from wherever they are at today into SOA - without the need to re-build or re-code.

Brad's vast experience and expertise have earned him roles as chief technology officer of a number of companies including IntelliReal, Open Access Broadband Networks and EventConnex. Brad has also been an active board member for a number of companies and organizations

including Geekcruises, Lantech Inc., Colorado Uplift and Cactus Strategies. Brad was actively involved in Young Presidents Organization from 1997, having served as the Colorado chapter's chapter chair, breakfast of champions chair, on-boarding chair, education chairperson, inventory of skills chairperson, technology officer, assistant education chairperson and membership chairperson. Brad currently teaches "New Venture Creation" in the graduate department of the University of Denver.

Along with TUSC co-founders Richard J. Niemiec and Joseph C. Trezzo, Brad is part of an award-winning company that earned the 2007 Oracle Titan Award, 2004 North America Oracle PartnerNetwork Partner Solution of the Year in the category of Oracle Application Server, as well as Internet Platform Partner of the Year in 2002. TUSC also has won the 2001 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the category of "E-developer," was inducted into the Chicago-Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 1998 and earned an Arthur Andersen-Chicago Best Practices Award for "Unleashing the Power of Technology."

About Rolta TUSC

Rolta TUSC's world-wide team of IT professionals tackle the toughest projects with a powerful combination of technical skill and business savvy forged by over twenty years of industry experience. Committed to our customers' success, we use proven strategies that help clients leverage technology to achieve their business goals.

Our Beginning and Our Vision

In 1988, Bradley D. Brown, Richard J. Niemiec, and Joseph C. Trezzo founded TUSC (The Ultimate Software Consultants) to focus on

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implementing and optimizing Oracle products. From the very beginning, the focal point was on providing high-quality consulting services to produce high customer satisfaction. Those principles have guided the growth of TUSC over the past 20 years and have clearly established us as "The Oracle Experts", leading to becoming an Oracle Certified Advantage Partner in both applications and technology and the winner of many industry awards including multiple Oracle "Partner of the Year" awards.

Our Growth into a Global Consultancy

In 2008, Rolta, a global IT and engineering company acquired TUSC as well as WhittmanHart Consulting, a leading EPM/BI/Hyperion consulting company, and Piocon, a leader in business intelligence solutions.

About Rolta

Rolta is an Indian multinational organization that has executed projects in over 40 countries. The Company is a strong player in the Defense, Government, Infrastructure and Security markets, worldwide.  Rolta serves these markets by providing innovative solutions in Geospatial Information Systems; Defense & Homeland Security; Engineering & Design Services; and Enterprise Information & Communications Technology. Rolta, through its joint venture with The Shaw Group, Inc., USA, provides comprehensive Engineering, Procurement and Construction Management (EPCm) services to meet turnkey project requirements of power, oil, gas and petrochemical sectors. Rolta's joint venture with Thales, France - Rolta Thales Ltd., develops and provides state-of-the-art C4ISTAR information systems, Military Communications, Digital Soldier & Vehicle System solutions, covering the entire "sensor to shooter" chain,

under transfer of technology from Thales.  Rolta, headquartered in Mumbai, employs about 5,000 professionals with a countrywide infrastructure and international subsidiaries across the globe. The Company has benchmarked its quality processes with the world's best quality standards. Rolta is accredited with the prestigious BSI ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification, the ultimate benchmark for information security; the BSI ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 IT Service Management Standard, and the Company's software development business group has been assessed at the highest level of SEI-CMMI Level 5. Forbes Global has ranked Rolta amongst the "Best 200 Under a Billion" for four times in six years. Rolta has been included in the S&P Global Challengers List™ 2008, by Standard & Poor's. This List identifies 300 mid-size companies worldwide that have a total market capitalization between US$1 to $5 Billion and have shown the highest growth characteristics along dimensions encompassing intrinsic and extrinsic growth. Rolta is listed on the NSE in cash and F&O segment and forms part of CNX IT, NIFTY Midcap 50 and CNX 500 indices. The Company is also listed on BSE 'A' group and forms part of BSE Midcap, BSE 200, BSE 500, BSE IT and BSE TECK indices. The Company's GDR is listed on the Main Board of London Stock Exchange and its FCCB's are listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange.

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