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174 Part 1 Introduction

The examples of web services we have given above all imply a user interacting with the web
service. But with the correct business rules and models to follow, there is no need for human
intervention and different applications and databases can communicate with each other in real
time. A web service such as Kelkoo.com which was discussed in Chapter 2 exchanges informa-
tion with all participating merchants through XML using an SOA. The concept of the
semantic web mentioned above and business applications of web services such as CRM, SCM
and ebXML are also based on an SOA approach. In another e-business application example
provided by the World Wide Web Consortium at www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part0/, a company
travel booking system uses SOAP to communicate with a travel company to book
a holiday.
Read Case Study 3.2 to explore the significance and challenges of SOA further.

Case Study 3.2 New architecture or just new hype? FT

Depending on whom you listen to, it could be the most It is hardly surprising that enterprise software com-
important shift in corporate computing since the advent panies – those that create the heavy-duty software that big
of the Internet – or it could be just the latest excuse for corporations and governments use to run their operations
technology companies to hype their products in a – are so eager to latch on to the next big thing.
dismal market. An industry still in its infancy is facing potential
‘We believe it’s the Next Big Thing’, says Henning disruptive upheaval. New licensing models and ways of
Kagermann, chairman of SAP, Europe’s biggest soft- delivering software, along with open-source approaches
ware company. to development and distribution, are turning the young
‘It’s the new fashion statement’, counters Mark software industry on its head.
Barrenechea, chief technology officer of Computer At the same time, the maturity of existing applications
Associates. ‘I’m sceptical.’ and the technology platform on which they run has left
The ‘it’ in question goes by the ungainly name of the best-established enterprise software companies
‘service-oriented architecture’, or SOA for short. stuck in a period of slow growth.
According to the big software companies, its impact on That is fertile soil for extravagant marketing claims to
computing will be as big as the client–server revolution of take root in.
the early 1990s, or the arrival of web-based applications Even if SOA risks are being over-hyped, however, it
with the internet. still seems likely to represent an important step forward
‘Every five or 10 years, we see this in the industry’, for today’s often monolithic corporate IT systems.
says John Wookey, the executive in charge of Oracle’s By harnessing industry-wide technology standards

Project Fusion, the giant effort to re-engineer all of the that have been in development since the late 1990s, it
software applications inherited as a result of that promises at least a partial answer to one of the biggest
company’s various acquisitions. drawbacks of the current computing base: a lack of
For those with ambitions to dominate the next phase flexibility that has driven up the cost of software devel-
of corporate software – SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft opment and forced companies to design their business
– it represents an important turning-point. ‘When these processes around the needs of their IT systems, rather
transitions occur you have your best opportunity to than the other way around.
change the competitive landscape’, adds Mr Wookey. Software executives say that the inability to redesign
Yet for customers, the benefits and costs of this next IT systems rapidly to support new business processes,
transformation in the underlying computing architecture and to link those systems to customers and suppliers,
are still hard to ascertain. was one of the main reasons for the failure of one of the
Bruce Richardson, chief research officer at AMR great early promises of the internet – seamless ‘B2B’, or
Research, draws attention to the unexpected costs that business-to-business, commerce.
came with the rise of client–server computing: the ‘It’s what killed the original [B2B] marketplaces’, says
soaring hardware and software expenses, the difficulty Shai Agassi, who heads SAP’s product and technology
of supporting such a wide array of machines, and the development.
cost of dealing with security flaws. SAP is certainly further ahead than others in the race
‘That ended up being a huge bill’, he notes. to build a more flexible computing platform. While