SOA Is Now a Business Imperative
Integration remains the number one IT priority; fully 60-70% of IT budgets are dedicated to it. Web services makes integrations simpler and cheaper. It makes B2B integrations practical. What businesses demand from a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is dynamic integration capability. They want rapid response to change, to competitors, to new business opportunities.

SOA built with Web services allows IT to build reusable business functions. Truly reusable business functions create efficiency, modularity, and easier integration. The functionality to be reused might be inventory, pricing, purchasing, shipping, and countless others. Most important, reusable business functions create flexibility. Flexibility and adaptability allow a business to respond to changing business conditions, to be agile.

Architectural Underpinnings of SOA
Instead of installing client code on your computer, SOA sends messages on your behalf to a remote computer. Message-based application integration is a key attribute of SOA: the messages are readable, self-describing XML business data.

The move to SOA is especially critical when a business has multiple channels of interaction. A large mutual funds company interacts via channels including the Web, automated phone systems, live customer service, and Web services to the employer's applications.

Today's SOA must be based on loosely coupled middleware like Web services to be flexible. A constant in business is change. Web services integrations are amenable to change. SOAs that rely on Web services do not place any requirements on the underlying technologies - because they are universally accepted standards and are built on the ubiquitous Web infrastructure.

Visibility Challenges SOA Creates
While SOA solves several critical problems for business, it creates new visibility challenges. Security is the first.

Traditional network security does not suffice when SOA is used for B2B integrations. Messages from B2B Web services are carefully designed to work over HTTP and come through firewalls. Incoming is a request for service to which your systems will provide an outgoing response from your company. That might be okay or it might be bad. How would you know? It is vital that someone monitors who is requesting which service, like the security camera watching a locked door.

Business visibility is another SOA challenge. In the past, since middleware messages have always been binary, proprietary, and opaque, there was no sense in asking them to monitor business information. Now the IT data flows are readable and contain actionable business information. If the goal of SOA is flexible, adaptable, reusable business functionality for integration, it stands to reason that we want to know the business impact fast adaptation actually had.

Deep Visibility Is Needed
For the first time we can map IT data flows to business context. To do so requires a new capability called deep visibility. It looks into the full business content of the XML messages and any of their attachments. Such deep visibility delivers the total business context of our SOA and the integrated applications built on it.

Deep visibility lets product managers see in real time which resellers are providing them with the best margins and indicates where to focus special offers or incentives.

Deep visibility lets the secure document repository managers understand who is accessing which critical business documents for what purpose and how often. This leads to improvements in the indexing of the most commonly used documents and metering of usage to create charge-backs.

Deep visibility lets the risk officers do a real-time drilldown on small credit card transactions that might otherwise fall below the radar. They focus on only the relevant portion of the XML message. Isolating first on the number of transactions at a certain suspicious dollar amount, then further on the number of transactions by card number at that amount, they can zero in on the fraudster's IP address.

SOA is a critical business imperative to remain agile and competitive. Be fully prepared for the visibility challenges it creates.