Why Is the High Tech Architecture Becoming So Popular between the Architects Now Days? Research Paper

Microsoft has not been so fast in opening the way for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the strategy has represented itself than a foray into service-oriented architecture and this has changed the way business interacts with information technology. But this has not come out of the ‘blues’ but it has been based on upcoming bundles of products that emphasize metadata, modeling, repositories, composite application, development and other immerse associated services. It is not a simple improvement in application development productivity tooling and maintenance instead it is a long-term trajectory towards the deeper and more focus on business design. Therefore, for one to be a strategic Architecture leader, one must be prepared to help his or her think widely in terms of the relationship between business and technology and not a simple and arduous process of writing down requirements documents, for any IT which in the real sense do not capture the real design of the business and only represent very few points, then there is a need for information technology enter and retrieve data (Cox, 1997).

¹In high tech architecture Business Problem Metadata (BPM) based solutions capture business processes in Metadata which controls the operation of the application at run time, for an increasing range of business, metadata is located at the center of a tectonic shift in the focus of a solution building and programming instead of applications being IT’s translations of selected business requirements, but this makes business technology solutions become direct reflections of the business design itself. At the same time, active metadata also allows business analysts to capture the major business design and policy decisions in a declarative way that enables them to understand and modify in teal time, with appropriate controls to effect the required changes in the operation of the business, and its common repository is meant to endure that various parts of the business design and metadata are appropriately related and connected (Kobelius, 2004).

However, ²microchip manufacturer, Intel, for example, instructs companies that are just starting with Service-oriented architecture, first to introduce it gradually with the assistance of business ROI tracking for each phase of the rollout. Secondly, each company should emphasize code or service reuse, because this is their main benefit to look for during the early stages of the process, and thirdly they should be patients because the evolution to full- functioning Service-Oriented Architecture takes time for it might take up to several years to start accruing tangible benefits for itself, even itself it started to develop and deployed a balance between the investment is put into creating a service and then kept track of how it was reused; even if it is a few times and with few projects and their aim was to maintain a balance between investment in the service and the return and they were able to achieve. After some calculations, they were able to identify a tipping point between the numbers of cases of reuse gotten out of the service before seeing a positive business ROI of their effort (Baden-Powell, 1993).

In time they moved to a higher level business service which was able to be consumed and reused, however, their main benefit was the reuse of services because each time you re-utilize the service in the process of developing a solution you save time. Nevertheless, it is also still under service-oriented architecture development. The benefits of the service-oriented approach are very impressive; projects take a shorter duration to be completed and this saves time and in addition, there is less project management.

With service-oriented architecture, it takes a shorter duration to create a business solution; but there is difficultness with many service-oriented architecture vendors because the majority of them can’t explain their product and what core problem it solves. This leaves the customers more confused, and in even a worse situation where the customers don’t get the main concept behind the product, not to mention service-oriented architecture.

For example, Greg was an Architect; he was under besieging by very obnoxious vendors trying to sell him Service Oriented Architecture, the first vendor promises Greg of Service-oriented architecture on the condition that his company migrates everything to the vendor’s software, hardware, and services, while the second speaks technobabble, and lastly ³the third only wants to help Greg reach his “inner Service-oriented architecture”. These are some of the many canned pitches service-oriented architecture vendors representatives tend to deliver rather than exploring the customer’s pain, points and requirements, in fact, Service-oriented architecture Vendors instead need to embrace a more consultative type of selling approach, and for them to succeed well they need to have the heart of a teacher, and not that of a salesman. From the Service-oriented architecture vendor perspective, one of their main challenges is ultimate philosophy and is not a tangible product (Graf, 1990).

Service-oriented architecture can provide a way to extend and deploy functionality without the original vendor, because with this true Service-oriented architecture in place, the customer will automatically have significant additional leverage since they can pick and choose, plugging in solutions from elsewhere and at the same time swapping out what no longer works with another vendor’s solution. This can be accounted for by the fact that most vendors have never sold architecture before; most of them have been dealing with just tactical products that service only some specific purpose. But of most importance to note is that all architectures, including Service-oriented architecture, are really around the right configuration of technology and understanding, and not the technology itself.

It was noticed in the recent past the fading away of mainframe computers, but today more and more people are using mainframe computers, in fact, more than any other time in the history of big iron, and these numbers continues to grow larger each day, exponentially; this has been achieved mainly because of the two main reasons. The big iron applications being extended via web services and secondly services-oriented architecture, like for example one can tap into mainframes every day for something or other over the web without realizing it is a big iron at the other end, and at the same time make calls to mainframes. Today many mainframe computers are at the center of the efforts to achieve enterprise data integration, and as well extend applications into service-oriented architectures. As a result of Service-oriented architecture, they are evolving into a leading role as a source of mission-critical data, and as well as key services (Collins, 1998).

I hope this would be good news for IBM definitely since even itself has been promoting its systems mainframe as the core engine of service-oriented architecture, as a big Blue Company and has therefore put several Service-oriented architecture and web-services to enable mainframe tools out on the market. It is only SOA that has made it possible to re-purpose mainframe applications and data that was initially locked away through a service layer accessible by any systems across the network.

However, all companies are currently still in the initial stages of expanding the capacity of their current mainframe systems to support service-oriented architecture and according to a recent study about one out of four companies have Service-oriented architecture efforts now in progress and another one third are planning or considering Service-oriented architecture and in addition, half of those engaged or planning Service-oriented architecture have already employed mainframes in a central role. But the bad news is that fewer than one out of ten companies have a substantial amount of their Service-oriented architecture-based services shared across two or more business units.

Since SAP Net Weaver, installed Service-oriented architecture it is now delivering a led Zeppelin-ish message, for them, after Service-oriented architecture, their motto was “there are two paths you can go by, but there is still time to change the road you are on.” It currently offers two paths to Service-oriented architecture, the first is through the evolution of its Enterprise Resource Planning environment, and the second is through software as a service. Their main platform has been then since the enterprise Service-oriented architecture which evolved to become the rich platform, the ERP 2006 suite. And their second main platform was the launch of Business ByDesign which was different from the lower and mid-market. This offers them software as a service environment and is itself an “enterprise Service-oriented architecture” by design. These two approaches have eventually come together as seen in many customer sites. However, in the meantime, pursuing both paths will help most companies no matter their size to a service-enabled Enterprise Resource Planning. They appreciate having moved to Enterprise Resource Planning space since on Enterprise Resource Planning space customer education is a big part of both initiatives as well; as a result, the Net Weaver now provides an end to end business process repository, which includes even service definitions that cone on top of the composite environment. The ones that can sit on top of SAP’s core Enterprise Resource Planning platform at the same capabilities are also currently accessible through the SaaS offering, this means one can extend his or her won business process, like the user-focused processes, workflow processes with ‘your own thing’, and then come back with mega transformations (Graf, 1990).

However, in the long run, service-oriented architecture offers a way to get around large enterprise suites like System Application Program, and at the same time avoid the paid and expense of vendor-driven upgrades. According to “Oracle syndrome” which is equivalent to Bib Bang Service-oriented architecture “The reality is that oracle is not about innovation rather it is about leveraging a captive installed base stitching together packaged applications with business process connectors so that one package can send a piece of data to another applications.” This is because to them one does not have to look to fusion on middleware to stitch it all together and then be able to deliver an integrated environment and by extension of Service Orientation Architecture any time soon; their big bang platform under its packaged applications is a slow methodical revamping of small components of Oracle’s applications and therefore, it means in the real sense that it will take decades before it would claim to have a common infrastructure under its applications.

Service-Oriented Architecture is the future of Software and no big bangs should be expected; the rule is one, incremental business-focused innovation, and not the exception, but this does not mean that there will be no unexpected innovations, there will be there and even most of them might come out of nowhere and may transform the world of software. However, no one should expect overnight wonders, because the most important innovations take a long time, like years even decades to mature and then change the world overnight. The global service-oriented architecture is becoming a reality for example web services and standardization has made it possible to share both IT and business services across enterprises, as well as across the internet (Collins, 1998).

Most privately run data centers, don’t have installed Service-oriented architecture as a result, they have achieved an immerse inefficiency, since these server firms are now designed and build for maximum local conditions and are now dedicated to specific solutions, they have eventually locked horizontally-oriented resources into vertically-oriented ‘solution silos’ with a typical data center utilization rate between 15-20%. These incredibly low rates of utilization negatively impact infrastructure and solution business ROI levels. For example, an online Podcasting Service Gigarox media, an Amazon customer, was reported to spend over $80 in its first two months of business on storage, messaging and processing, because it used the simple storage, the Amazon simple storage service (S3) to store files from podcasts, videocasts, and advertising images. The only alternative they had was to buy disks and storage arrays to provide buck up storage space, but this space was very small and ⁴expensive with a typical price disk range in between $2,500 to $20,000 for network-attached storage units. It is even considered to invest in switches and hubs, even experts to put it all together, to enable them to manage on an ongoing basis. The company later adopted Amazon ECZ to fulfill its transcoding and automated show-assembly needs and the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) which served as a link between services monitoring ECZ server instance, queuing transcoding requests, and issuing transactions for program processing (Collins, 1998). In the end, Dong Kaye, a co-founder, and CTO of GigaVox said gave in to Service-oriented architecture and said “Even if we could have done this with a cluster of outsourced managed servers which is still wouldn’t have been as scalable, we would have spent tens of thousands of dollars more we did not have to buy a single server. We didn’t have to spend any time in a “cage”.”

What everyone will ask here, including me is if service-oriented architecture has obvious advantages for startups and small companies, then how it will go over for longer, and more established companies? However, some hard questions relating to the above big and well-established companies need to be addressed here:

1. Surveys worked out show that larger companies are not so much inclined to tap into the cloud solutions for mission-critical applications because the system that they have built up for years still offers competitive advantages even the 20-year old mainframe programs contain custom processes and the logics that provide market advantages.
2. Most managers of big companies are worried whether, rather than the initial rush of cost savings, cloud computing homogenizes enterprises will wash away a competitive advantage.
3. A transition is not simple as many people might think because any great transition will still require a great deal of integration work for established companies.
4. Since most vendors are not reliable, one is left in the dark as to what happens next once the fellow goes out of business.
5. Lastly, the issues of security, especially because most sites are in the hands of someone else.

Therefore it means a large-scale movement to this set of computing may be required to take more time as these issues are being sorted. There is also speculation that all it would take some large companies to tap into an enterprise service like IBM, to enable ⁵them see total IT operating costs go down by 40% in a few years and this will change the rules of the IT game forever; nevertheless there are also associated productivity benefits of service-oriented architecture services ecologies like Sales Force.com, which will eventually lead to greater agility, in the way they acquire and adjust their business processes and service delivery; it, therefore, means doing more for less and much less IT labor (Kobelius, 2004).

In terms of service-oriented architecture and governance, one might wonder what is the difference between the two; to me, both are the same and makes me too conclude that we, therefore, have a new slew of concepts and terms which add little over or above the good old terminology. This is because we are most often than not, prone to dress up traditional concepts with fancier-sounding buzzwords to foist the latest products on enterprise buyers. Going back to the words; governance is simply management, but in a service-oriented structure, it has meaning above and beyond plain old management. In a service-oriented architecture, it is the creation, communication, enforcement maintenance, and adaptation of policies across the entire service, oriented architecture lifecycle of design time, run time, and change time. It matters a lot to Service-oriented architecture since it has too many moving parts and therefore without mechanisms of control and enforcement, business policies can be breached and this will result in individual’s acting in ways that will hurt the organization, in addition, technical policies can also be breached, this will result into non-functioning, inefficient or technical services that are not compliant. To ensure it’s efficient, executives don’t need to manage service-oriented architecture but they should elicit support cooperation and of utmost importance is the feeling of the sense of ownership from various parts of the enterprise. However, for more advanced deployments like brokers and non-web service-based environments, it is a much bigger and complex problem to deal with.

All the same, service-oriented architecture has made several successes: – It has enabled companies to see drastic reductions in project cycle times and there is a lot of consolidation in purchasing across the enterprise, the decrease in IT backlog is an interesting metric that can be used to judge the efficiency and business ROI of the service orientation architecture since the batch rate is going down, as a result, it is becoming more of a continuous stream of delivery and this points to the loftier goals of reuse and agility. For example, a certain company leveraged its buying power with service-oriented architecture and is currently saving $40 million in a year (Adas 1989). It did not buy the project as “Service-oriented architecture” but as a positioned purchased consolidated effort. The manufacturer was buying all the raw materials at a corporate level across 136 plants and it was then consolidated into a single service, all the vendors now see the company as one entity and this enabled it to reduce 40 million from the demand side supply chain annually and service-oriented architecture also allowed them to attain that kind of benefits.

The Service-oriented architecture universe is actually at the moment heading towards a model-driven paradigm for distributed services development in orchestration, even Microsoft has recently discussed its service-oriented architecture; in its Business, Problem Metadata conference was nothing but radically new for the industry or Microsoft. However, there is little confusion following its announcement that there are no clear footprints for actual standards that have been developed for example the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Microsoft, therefore, has not been able to divine at the same time it is also steering clear of UML in terms of their repositories. I hope I’m not getting any sense that there is a UDDI story here or those of any standards angle to these converged repositories that they will be rolling out within their various tool. So one might as well ask whether Microsoft is Microsoft-oriented architecture because it is now they are building proprietary interfaces. In the real sense, the software giant has been lukewarm as indicated earlier, however, it is now encompassing management into its modeling framework, at the same time, they are planning to support some standards within some working frameworks like the Service Modeling Language (SML), this allows the transition from development through operations, and this is actually about the model-driven life cycle. In addition, there is a likelihood of potential growth of Domain Specific Language (DSL) which underpins the elements of the visual studio as a way of supporting different modeling paradigms, and what we expect to see being applied here is the resurgence of DSL as a means of enabling different modeling approaches (Kobelius, 2004).

In the actual sense, Microsoft is leap-flogging the market, trying to project how things are going to be in a good number of years ahead. It is also recognizing that there are also going to be a variety of modeling approaches and at the same time appreciating that modeling is going to be essential for making Service-oriented architecture. In addition, they are going to be federating and that is why they are fifty-fifty about their framework and foundations. And in the end, it might adopt an alternative model to the challenges of enterprise service-oriented architecture to level its approach and visual studio toll set around its storied developer community while other vendors are going to be left in the non-Microsoft world talking about enterprise-wide Service-oriented architecture initiatives but the reality is that the number of organizations that have gone that far is considerably small because we continue to see the same customers being reintroduced again and again.

This is for the main reason that Microsoft’s goal is not to chase or compete with Oracle, IBM, and SAP customers but its whole idea is to create a new Service-oriented architecture market out of the underserved or the not served at all SMB-sector.

The economy is another trend that needs to be looked at carefully for it can drive or ditch all initiatives, despite the best efforts put to them. This is because the state of the economy helps to shape both vendor messaging and service-oriented architecture initiatives since when business executives make decisions about Service-oriented architecture purchases and resources, their decisions will be viewed through the ‘lens of the economy.

Even those selling or advocating Service-oriented architecture will also be required to adjust their messages as well. However, a question still arises, whether this entire means that Service-oriented architecture is a fat budget item that is ready to be chopped, or it is a chopping mechanism in and of itself. We have a highly diverse and resilient economy that has survived many weathered storms. This is because a softening economy will send Service-oriented architecture into an entirely different direction than stead growing economy, but to what direction and how will it then position itself in such kind of circumstances?

In a ‘soft’ economy, IT budgets are more reigned than they are, therefore, it would mean that major purchases would be forestalled or canceled altogether, as was seen during the downturn of 2001, with pullbacks from CRM, Supply Chain Management, and other major projects. But in this time around, companies would entirely hold off on major middleware purchases like web sphere and web logic and this would then be an open-source or commodity solution, and therefore, Service-oriented architecture will save. Entrance into this kind of environment would then need to emphasize cost-cutting and efficiency that will be gained through reuse, sharing, and standardization interfaces that cat systems integration time.

In this kind of environment, Service-oriented architecture is employed as a euphemism for “down sizing” just like a business process that is re-engineering a developed bad name in the past. While in a good economy, Service-oriented architecture adds revenue because as the economy keeps on growing it shrugs off the mortgage mess and due to higher oil process and this leads to a “growth tract” required for Service-oriented architecture. This means Big Service-oriented architecture that is offered by Big vendors will continue to dominate headlines and the emergence of Service-oriented architecture in this environment will continue to emphasize the emerging realms of event-driven or real-time architectures, in addition to expanding systems beyond the firewall to their partners. It is also entirely appropriate to keep positioning Service-oriented architecture as an enabler of business agility, and this contributes directly to increased revenues.

Service-oriented architecture is a master in data management, for example, a pharmaceutical giant was trying to bring together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single centralized data definition (Fuller 1996). In sorting out for assistance, they turned to Service-oriented architecture to decouple its data from its applications like SAP, Oracle, and Web logic, as a result, the company solved its problem and they later acknowledged that it is a mechanism they can now begin distributing data. A team of experts generated a standard set of interfaces for accessing its MDM tool and sent it into their Service-oriented architecture. But it is important to know that one can’t do Service-oriented architecture without data and within ‘silos’. However, one thing is clear; they both require enterprise governance to succeed because master data management is much more about governance than technology.

It is also important to appreciate the long way Service-oriented architecture has come in recent years specifically in terms o if its ability to map to business processes and providing closer real-time event handling. But in these days there is a new drive to event-driven architecture, or EDA, which is part and parcel of Service-oriented architecture and about it, is the drive to better support Business Process Management and Business Monitoring Activity (BAM). This has resulted in a new series of Webcasts, for example in the recent Service-oriented architecture in action conference. As a result, more and more business people now want near real-time activity into their companies and the external environment so that they can sense and respond more quickly.

Business dashboard and Business activity monitoring (BAM) are now being seen talking off because services-oriented architecture and event-driven architecture provide a foundation that makes business activity monitoring more practical and more common. In the actual sense Business Monitoring Activity acts as a catalyst for Service-oriented architecture for it does not require service printed architecture, but it usually uses it and the solution which is seen as a dashboard does not need to be with the sender or receiver of the data but it instead resides in the middleware and this is the main reason why many companies have today started the process of building applications for they will be able to implement other things like those of service-oriented architecture (Dixon 1995). It might be the only piece of Service-oriented architecture “that is directly visible to end users”.

Bibliography

1. Adas, M. (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
2. Baden-Powell, F. (1993). In the article “Building overseas, Butterworth Architecture Management Guide” Oxford and Boston: Butterworth Archtecture.
3. Collins, P. (1998). Changing Ideals in Modern Archtecture, 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill- Queens University Press.
4. Graf, K. (1990).International Design and Practice. Unpublished transcript of a discussion at American Institute of Architects, Washington, D.C.,
5. Cox, K. R. (1997). In the article “Spaces of Globalization”; London and New York: Guilford Press.
6. Dixon, J. M. (1995). In the article “Exporting architecture”. Progressive architecture.
7. Fuller, L. P. (1996). In the article “Going global”. World Architecture,
8. Kobelius. J., (2004). In the article “Industry interest in model-driven architecture (MDA).”Analysis

Footnotes

1. Cox, K. R. In the article “Spaces of Globalization”; (London and New York: Guilford Press: 1997).
2. Kobelius. J.. In the article “Industry interest in model-driven architecture” (MDA: 2004). Analysis
3. Graf, K. International Design and Practice. Unpublished transcript of a discussion at American Institute of Architects (Washington, D.C:1990)
4. Collins, P. Changing Ideals in Modern Archtecture, 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press: 1998).
5. Kobelius. J.. In the article “Industry interest in model-driven architecture” (MDA: 2004). Analysis