SOA enablement

One of world's largest Transportation and Logistics software products company contemplated product modernization, but lacked the skills needed to re-architect and design a SoA-enabled product suite, and so hired Imaginea's services. Imaginea's experience in helping ISVs with technology adoption and optimizing solutions; its understanding of JEE, SOA; and its vendor neutrality, worked in its favor.

SoA engagement goals

Imaginea carried out a product review and recommended an approach for SOA adoption with an initial prototype leading to a complete overhaul, later. Broadly, the engagement goals were:

1. Understand the customer's SOA needs
2. Evolve a systematic way to build services on existing systems
3. Governance: Approach to de?ne the interfaces and add to registries
4. Build the process layers (BPM)
5. Process change management
6. Bind to various technology vendors, where required, (optional)

Since the product had been built on earlier architectural patterns and technologies, SOA-enabling it posed certain challenges. Imaginea's team carried out a two-week onsite product analysis, and prototyped and designed the right solution offsite, and prepared the SOA-Enabling Approach and SOA Governance Compliance reports in the next four weeks.

Change - one step at a time

Imaginea uses a well-planned, methodology to SOA-enable existing applications:

1. Build Services - 'Wrap' Existing Function
2. Express Application Functionality as Set of Business Processes with Flow Steps
3. Orchestrate Enterprise-Wide Processes to 'Automate' Flows
4. Ensure Manual Intervention Points Covered in Process
5. Weave Services, Processes and Worklists Together

Imaginea does not promote a big-bang approach. Incremental development with prototypes and reviews are carefully managed to build up the entire stack. The customer was pleased with this approach and as a follow-up, the customer engaged Imaginea to architect and re-design their current individual products, integrating them into one product-suite. The architecture design and modernization project based on Java/JEE and SOA-ESB patterns, was completed some months later, following a similar approach.