back to the main page
Retailers Sold on Service-Oriented Architecture
A recent survey conducted by analyst firm Gartner revealed that major retailers are moving toward service-oriented architecture in a very big way.
According to the recent "2007 RIS News Tech Trends Study," one in five retailers that responded to the survey have begun SOA projects and more than half will have done so within the next two years.
Given the unique business pressures retailers face, the move makes sense, according to David Dorf, director of technology strategy for Oracle Retail and cochair of the SOA Blueprint for Retail project.
"To succeed, retailers must achieve a single view of complex, multichannel consumer behavior information, link that up with inventory information, and simultaneously track the complexities of an ever-changing market," Dorf explains. "SOA has become a priority, because it promises finally to link the silos that contain store, e-commerce, merchandising, supply, and inventory management operations."
From Point-to-Point to SOA
Until recently, using point-to-point integration was the most common way to link business applications. The problem is, it's a labor-intensive approach that can make it difficult to change any of the connected business processes-a critical flaw for retailers that face constantly changing business conditions.
By contrast, SOA provides a bus or hub configuration that significantly reduces the number of necessary integrations. Based on interoperability, loose coupling, location transparency, modularity, and self-healing, SOA gives retailers consistent business logic across varied platforms in stores, in distribution centers, and at corporate headquarters.
For example, SOA allows sharing of pricing, discounts, tax calculations, and item information across channels, regardless of individual programming languages and operating environments. New applications can make use of existing services quickly and are able to immediately expose new services for consumption. Changes to the customer database are done strictly through the designated service, enabling an additional level of security and audit. And as transaction volume increases during peak selling season, additional copies of key services are brought online to handle the increased load.
SOA Step by Step
"There's a common misconception that companies need a clean slate to begin taking advantage of an SOA. This is absolutely not the case, and, in fact, most IT organizations begin developing their SOA one service at a time," says Dorf.
Retailers can take a first step by "service-enabling" their applications-that is, repackaging and exposing existing business logic as services. Once these services become mission-critical, retailers can build a solid, comprehensive SOA technology stack based on open standards, including
- Services repository and registry
- Enterprise service bus to handle routing and transformations
- Business process engine that includes human-interaction workflow and rules processing
- Management product that handles monitoring and security
"The bottom line is that for retailers, the promise of SOA is too compelling to ignore," says Dorf.
back to the top
|
