Agile SOA - without the wait

Create Web Services by wrapping legacy applications - now that's agile

You have a workflow that involves 2 legacy (10 year old) windows applications (say written in VB and C++), a legacy web application (say 2 years old with embedded DHTML and Ajax), a packaged Java application and an SAAS application like salesforce.com. This workflow (transaction) is carried out 10’s of thousands of times every day by hundreds of users.

How quickly would you expect to build a service around some or all of this process? 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years perhaps?

Assuming you can persuade your SAAS and packaged application vendors to do their share in your timeframe, there is still no telling really how long this will take. All of the business logic needs to be replicated, that so far took thousands of man years to develop and assuming you actually know where to find it! In the mean time of course, your business user requirements around improving and extending this workflow are not standing still. Indeed they must not stand still in today’s competitive environment.

What if you could wrap these existing applications and workflows, and have your SOA that way? What if you could taking any of your (or your vendors) existing web services (if they exist yet) and have them participate immediately in these workflows without waiting the 1, 3, 5, or 10 years? You wouldn't even need to understand your existing business logic because it would automatically get carried forward in the wrapping.

At OpenSpan, we believe in SOA but we believe it should not take away the critical importance of remaining Agile. This applies to remaining Agile around the deployment of SOA as you build it out as well as being agile around changing business requirements. If you build a web service, your existing applications should be able to consume it right now (see Last Mile of SOA).

A successful SOA strategy will be an Agile SOA strategy. IT and Business both win with this approach. IT get to work on their long term SOA strategy yet remain the superstars for introducing SOA immediately, and whilst continuing to deliver on the ever changing real-world business needs.

If only all PC applications were Open

They can be.

For quite some time, Salesforce.com has had some really good integration with Microsoft Outlook. I love the fact that whilst in Outlook, I can click a button that pushes the email or the contact information into the relevant contact in salesforce.com. A way cool benefit to me as a business user. There are other vendor applications that have some cool close ties with Outlook and other Office components but compared to the number of applications out there, there are relatively few that integrate so closely.

So, it begs the question, why are so few applications tightly coupled like this?. Why should integration only be limited to those vendors that chose to tie their solutions to other vendors product, like Microsoft Office. If only any application could be tied to Outlook in the same way, even if the original developers didn’t build that functionality into their application.

OpenSpan can take virtually any application and enable this cool plug-in capability with Office, even if you don’t own the application or have any source code. With OpenSpan’s ability to rapidly give applications an API where one previously didn’t exist, existing applications extensibility takes on a new lease on life!

In fact, you are not limited to just Microsoft Office either! Ever wanted to integrate one of your applications to Google Office? Now you can and you don’t have to be a hard core developer to do it!

There are a lot of things you can do, now there are ways to give existing applications virtually instant API’s.