When a telecommunications company renews a calling card, the process has historically involved knowledge workers in billing, customer service and several other departments within the company each updating their records, a cumbersome process for a renewal that might be very small in revenue and therefore in profitability.

Other companies have been similarly "siloed" in their processes. Some companies have tried to solve this challenge by developing Web services that use XML technology to share information. While that eliminates much of the redundancy for new customers and new services, Web services alone do not solve the problem of information that is contained in older legacy systems, such as mainframe computers.

The solution that companies are increasingly turning to in order to meet the challenge is service-oriented architecture (SOA), which connects knowledge not only to Web services, but also to an increasing number of legacy systems as it continues to evolve, says Hemant Ramachandra, managing director of BearingPoint's (bearingpoint.com) SOA solutions group.

"Companies don't want to spend a ton of money rebuilding technology from scratch," Ramachandra says. By using SOA, they can use the knowledge that already exists in older systems like mainframes to populate new service offerings, like a new calling card to a current customer who has other telecommunications services. With SOA, the customer's name, address and other pertinent information can be retrieved from the mainframe to populate the appropriate areas for the marketing offer and, if the offer is accepted, billing, collections, customer service and other areas within the company.

SOA has been around for a few years, but in the last year the use of it has evolved to include more systems, more companies have adopted it and it has moved from something that vendors pushed to something that buyers are actively seeking, according to Paul Hernacki, CTO for Definition 6 (defi nition6.com), an Internet consulting firm that develops collaboration and ecommerce solutions.

"Services that are reusable are easier to adopt throughout the enterprise," Hernacki explains. "In 2005, people were putting a lot of the SOA emphasis on the technology and the systems. Now they're placing the focus more on the user experience. Now the customer experience is king."

This means that companies providing technologies designed to be SOA-compliant need to work with IT people and users within organizations to ensure the technologies are functional, says Jodi Cicci, global deployment director for Software AG (softwareag.com).

Neal Keene, VP for solutions for Thunderhead (thunderhead.com), agrees. "More and more companies are asking whether a technology is SOAcompliant," he says. "They're a little more specific about what they want."

What they want, he continues, are technologies that enable users to retrieve company information in any format from a variety of applications-f or example, document management systems that can retrieve required disclosures and other compliance-related information and then present that information on a desktop, laptop or other device.

"They want systems that can easily create the content and then be able to retrieve it from other systems," Keene says. "SOA has the potential to move an enterprise forward." For example, a financial services company using an SOA architecture can enable mobile loan officers to be as effective as loan officers sitting at their desks.

But that potential depends on the system easily providing the information the user needs. Some earlier systems failed because they required the user to have too much technical knowledge, according to Keene. That meant not only technology crashes, but also underutilization of systems. "There have been a lot of horror stories about breakdowns because people were using systems that were only loosely coupled together," he says.

So the first step in adopting an SOA architecture is planning. "You need to understand what the company's goals are. Some think they can just stick systems together quickly. The amount of testing that you need to do goes up quite a bit. You have to look at how [applications] tie back to legacy systems. Sometimes it can't be done," Keene adds.

And Ramachandra cautions: "SOA is not a silver bullet."

With proper planning, however, companies can use SOA to help non-technical employees be more productive. Customer service agents in a company employing SOA, for example, can see a customer's other relationships (other accounts, past purchases, etc.) and can more effectively up-sell or cross-sell.

With the earlier focus on technology and systems, an SOA offering may have performed well technically, but if it were too complex for the user, he or she would stay with older, inefficient, redundant systems, according to Hernacki. "If it's too challenging for the user, they're less likely to use it. People inherently want something that's easy, something that's quick," he says.

A good example of the new mindset, according to Hernacki, is Microsoft Sharepoint Server, an application that enables users to search and tab through information stored throughout the enterprise. Microsoft just launched the 2007 version of the product, with user-oriented improvements over the previous version. "It was designed with the user experience in mind," Hernaki says.

Part of the reason for that shift in focus from the technicians and developers to the users is that the users themselves have a better idea of what they want, according to Keith Swenson, VP of research and development for Fujitsu Computer Systems (computers.us.fujitsu.com). "A year ago, a lot of people inside organizations still didn't know what [SOA] was. There was a lot of confusion," he says.

Other SOA experts say that adoption of SOA has gotten another boost in the last year because knowledge of the technology, its capabilities and potential benefits for organizations has extended beyond IT professionals to those in the corporate suite.

"Now people are looking around for what they can do with [SOA]," Swenson says.

SOA in action

The answer is plenty, with the organizations with the highest knowledge usage achieving the greatest benefits. For example, a multinational oil company is using SOA technology to collect emission information for its various sites throughout the world, according to Larry Goldenhersh, president and CEO of Enviance (enviance.com). The company previously recorded the information from each site, recorded the data on a spreadsheet, and then compared it against allowable emissions. With some 2,000 different permits requiring about 25,000 reports on a monthly basis, that was a cumbersome, labor-intensive and slow process.

"Companies know that it is easier and less expensive for knowledge workers to use Web-based services to gather this information," Goldenhersh says.

Now that the company has added SOA-based technology to monitor systems-specifically, Web-based services-manual recording and reporting are no longer necessary. The company now uses an Internet-based system to collect all of the information and input it into environmental reports and active dashboards. The dashboards allow the company to quickly see when emissions are too high and to take corrective action, Goldenhersh says. The company can recognize and correct problems more quickly, enabling it to minimize fines and penalties.

"Using SOA is the best way for companies to install best-of-breed point solutions," says Morris Panner, CEO of OpenAir (openair.com). "It's a way of bridging data silos and a cost-effective way of automating processes."

Though some businesses, such as financial services organizations, have discussed breaking down information silos for several years, the actual implementation and use of enterprisewide search/SOA-based applications is still relatively new, according to Bearing-Point's Ramachandra.

Challenges exist

Part of the challenge with the adoption of SOA is that some systems and some organizations aren't ready for it. Some older systems and applications aren't capable of working in an SOA environment without some type of middleware, says Charles Isaacs, CTO for KANA (kana.com).

"SOA can't be a point solution," Keene adds. "It can't just be a technical implementation."

The need for SOA, which is more encompassing than enterprise resource or customer relationship management systems, has led to acquisitions or partnerships among technology providers in the last year. BearingPoint has partnered with Oracle (oracle.com) on Project Fusion to provide SOA-related technologies that work with legacy Oracle systems.

BEA (bea.com) acquired Flashline (flashline.com), known for its enterprise metadata repository. The Flashline repository will be a key component of the company's AquaEogic product family, BEA reports. It will enable tracking, governing and managing liquid assets in a common repository for sharing across multiple projects and measuring the resulting business value.

Similarly IBM (ibm.com) acquired FileNet (filenet.com) to expand on the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings.

"One of the goals of an SOA infrastructure is to implement automation as thoroughly as possible throughout the organization to reduce repetitive types of tasks," says Dave Caldiera, VP of platform product marketing for FileNet.

So, these systems enhance workflow not only by sharing information between systems, but also by automatically triggering workflow from one application to another in sequential processes like a loan application. The customer applies online, the application takes the personal information to run a credit check. If the applicant meets the credit requirements, the necessary information flows through to the next process, which continues the loan process.

In the next year, experts expect SOA to become more ingrained in organizations and adapted by eversmaller enterprises as they seek to gain some efficiency and other benefits that the technology offers. As that happens, more organizations will look for an increasing number of SOA initiatives, says Caldiera, who, like many others, expects further maturation of the technology in the next several months.