Jiri’s Notepad

It is quite common to look at product vendors for innovation and yes, big vendors have done quite a bit to get their share in service oriented software. It is quite surprising to hear about technology innovation driven from a user side. Yet my personal experience as well as anecdotal evidence from the field proves, it happens more often than you would expect. SOA is the buzzword of the day and the word in the street is that off the shelf service oriented products do not provide sufficient management capabilities for large scale enterprise deployment. In situation those, subscribing to ‘buy not build’ approach chose to wait, others like Verizon, decided that ‘build, not buy’ made more sense for them and developed their own service repository:

Verizon set out to use SOA to reduce support costs by consolidating these core functions from 20 or 30 implementations to one or three, in each case. The first step was to spend months identifying roughly 500 key business functions that were used over and over again for many applications.

“We didn’t go through 10 million lines of code. We picked out 500 business functions and targeted them,” Zafar says, citing examples such as the credit check service, the telephone number engine that provides new customers with telephone numbers, and the address validation service. “An ordering system might go through four or five of these key components.”

Getting these 500 Web services built required deploying SOA not just as a methodology, but as an IT governance principle. “We implemented a process whereby all development projects would have to go through a strategic architectural assessment session to get approval before they were started. If any of the functions were one of those 500 core business functions we had identified, or we found another suitable business object, the team would have to implement it as a Web service. Once the project was completed, it would go through a tactical architectural assessment session that would verify the Web services were built before giving clearance to go into production,” Zafar says.