Published on the 20/08/2008 | Written by Newsdesk
Bruce Gordon, chief technology officer of business solutions vendor Infor, says using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework helps his company effectively introduce new capabilities into its software…
Gordon spoke to iStart about how the SOA approach works.
Q. Why is the SOA approach so important?
A: SOA provides the commonality between the various components of a solution. We have taken standardisation to the next level with the adoption of a wide range of industry-accepted protocols so that our applications can be ported across platforms without any translation or compatibility issues.
Similarly we build in data management processes and tools to define and manage the non-transactional data across applications, again without conversion issues. And at the core, we have developed an extensive library of services that can be populated with the standardised data, formatted in compatible interfaces and accessed from user-centric web-based requests. This focus on standards and compatibility is the basis for our SOA architecture.
What the end user sees is what we call a ‘role-based home page’ that aggregates the information that is available and presents it in a customised web format. The user can then drill down, query and generate reports from a single interface, typically a right click of the mouse.
For users, SOA provides transparent access to incredible amounts of information. For the IT staff , SOA means that they can add additional services without disrupting their current operations. And for financial managers, SOA means that they can pay for upgrades, enhancements and expansions without breaking the bank.
Q. Will we be seeing more vendors embedding an SOA framework into their solutions?
A. In a few years SOA will become the de facto standard for software engineering. Already we are seeing more and more companies building their solutions to work within an SOA framework.
Sharing information between entities – amongst workgroups within a company, between suppliers and customers, within your particular community of interest – is only going to increase. The growing popularity of SOA is both a push – companies have to become more open with their business processes if they want to stay competitive – and a pull – SOA provides the mechanisms to support this openness.
Q. It looks like building SOA support into a solution can have an enormous positive impact on the application by providing an almost unlimited opportunity for expansion.
A. Absolutely. That is exactly our strategy at Infor. We have purchased best-of-breed functionality and taken the various routines, or services, such as credit management and debt collection functionality, and turned them into stand-alone functions. Enterprises can then plug these services directly into their operations because the services are based on standard data characteristics and formatting.
Similarly, enterprises can take services from other applications, such as asset management or performance management, and implement them cleanly into their operations.
