Selling SOA - a guide

David Chamberlain, dchamberlain@us.ibm.com
WebSphere Business Development
A change from the mainline theme - but valuable nonetheless...

A frequently asked question is "how do I sell SOA?" Well, we in the business all know the difficulty of selling a concept or an architecture - so following are some thoughts about the best way (IMHO) to approach the successful selling of SOA...

SOA is built around the concept of re-useable services that can be assembled into business processes to drive value for a business. The most crucial thing to understand is the (business) situation your customer is in. What are their burning problems and key business objectives? These might be voiced as; "We intend to become a world class manufacturing organization" or "We want to link suppliers and customers" or "We will reduce costs by reducing in-stock inventory by 50%" or ... Well, you get the picture. Once you've got that, then you need to understand which business processes will impact results for those key objectives and unearth how those processes are enabled.
SOA is IT enablement (and best achieved in a step by step fashion). The next thing to understand is the (technology) situation your customer finds itself in. What are their current major projects - and why are those projects important? What are the major applications in use? Where do they come from, how long have they been in place and what are the plans for them? What sort of technology standards and suppliers have they adopted or committed to? How do they currently do integration? How does their IT intersect with their business process pain points? Where do these business process pain points link to the business objectives you've already identified?

Is this really different than how you’ve approached selling a major project in the past? Yes, it is. For the first time, LOB executives and IT can speak the same lingua franca - business processes - SOA provides the required underpinnings to link business and IT objectives in a meaningful - and executable - way. Now we can start to see the value that SOA brings to a customer!

Where to start? Here are a starter set of people to talk to, and the types of question you should be asking....
General LOB execsWhat are the key projects IT is working on for you?
Which projects are you waiting on? and why are they important to you?
What is the financial impact of delays?
How do you and IT work together to ensure alignment of goals?
VP Marketing
How long does it take to bring new products to market?
Where are the bottlenecks or hold ups in product introductions?
VP Manufacturing
How well integrated is your supply chain?
Where do you stand in comparison with your competitors on KPIs?

The trick is to ask open questions that are relevant your customer’s business and gain valuable insight into how their business operates and the issues they are facing. Map answers against business processes and the IT that enables them to find high-return opportunities for SOA.

Generating greater yield

Saturday morning cartoons are on, several coffees under my belt - and thoughts turn to SOA...

Now you have a customer hooked on your application and starting to roll it out - what next? The biggest issue faced by most ISVs is the ability of their customers to easily consume their application throughout the possible target communities of end users! Why is this so? Getting more end users actively using an application is key to driving revenue - yet however good, compelling etc the application is, they struggle with integrating it - with and across the full set of existing apps. So the more quickly the app can be integrated - the more quickly more users can use it - the more seats deployed the more the customer pays - the total sum of ISV/customer/end-user happiness is increased = goodness. The happier customers are, the more likely they are to buy more - get the picture - no rocket science here.

So what does SOA have to do with all this? Easy consumability and integration - when the ISV app is provided as services rather than a monolith - it becomes much easy to integrate into the customer environment - hang the services off the ESB that powers the SOA and bingo (some details have been left out for clarity) - the app is integrated and deployable wide and deep by the customer.

There are of course some interesting exercices the ISV (as do customers) need to consider - granularity of the services - what levels of TLAs to support - what type of pre-built flows to deliver - more details in a later writting.

Reducing development, maintenance and upgrade costs and release cycle times

This is the first of 6 entries where I will pontificate at great length (just kidding) on each of the major areas where I feel ISVs can gain greatest benefit from adopting a Service Oriented Approach to modeling, building, releasing and upgrading business applications.

The first area (picked at random from the 6) is how SOA reduces costs - by bringing benefits to the whole application development, maintenance and release cycles that are the lifeblood - and downfall of many - ISVs.

12-18-24 month release cycles are common - by the time you figure out what to put in the "next release" - combinations of user requests - things to fix, stuff you didn't last release but had said you would, new standards etc the list seems somehow endless. Now you've figured out what to put in - size the effort - always 2 times more than you can do - so cycle through what's in and what's out (you get the picture)... Now crunch time - you have to code it all, keeping the old running while introducing the new. Using sets of tools from who knows where - maybe each developer's preference - or maybe a standard set you have introduced. Once coded start testing, units, regression testing, integration testing, performance testing - the list seems endless. Then final, many months if not years later, the big day arrives - the new release is ready - now the brown stuff really hits the fan. You didn't do enough testing, doesn't work the way it did (well, most of it sort of does), integration with application X breaks and so on and so on...

What does SOA bring to all this - rather than dealing with some monolith - imagine dealing with a set of relatively granular services, each built, tested and potentially released individually. These services can then be assembled, using modern tools into the desired "application(s)". It's far simpler to manage the release cycle for a number of services than the monolith they replaced. Maybe can say goodbye someday soon to the idea of the next release - and our kids will look back (let's hope they are actually doing something else other than coding) - and laugh about the good old days.

SOA - What me gov?

This has been a long time in the making - finally the stars have aligned up and it seems we are at a point where many of the promises of of the 20 or so (has it really been that long?) years can be fulfilled. So, what is aligning? Well, first is the set of standards the industry has been working on for the last 5 years - starting really with UDDI and moving through a seemingly ever arcane set of TLAs, FLA and now SLAs. This move to real standardization has happened at the same time as businesses have felt a tremendous squeeze to perform - the bubble, outsourcing and so on and so on... This has forced business to really think about how they finally align their business and IT objectives, and what sort of IT they need to support the required business flexibility.

So, what does this all have to do with you, the ISVs that build, sell support and enhance business applications and business processes. The aim of this blog is to explore the six major areas of business value that moving to an SOA brings you. Bottom line, if you think about your business in the way that your customers think about their business - things will (hopefully) become much clearer.

My aim is to write a fresh entry once a week - each time elaborating on one of the six areas of business value to ISVs. Please interact and collaborate on this key topic, the sooner we reach a common understanding of the value SOA brings, the sooner we - and our customers - can start reaping the rewards.