Management View

Business Objectives

With its promise of flexible, reusable and cost-effective development, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been heralded as both hero and villain by IT media and analysts. Initially lauded as essential for long-term business success, more recent reports have taken a 180-degree turn, virtually writing SOA’s obituary. Although it is true that early adopters discovered implementation wasn’t easy and became victims of SOA’s over-hype, other companies are successfully implementing SOA and realizing significant benefits.

The SOA Center of Excellence hopes to address these concerns and help companies reach their business potential with SOA, avoiding the implementation issues businesses have experienced in the past.

In the “trenches” every day, Rolta can attest to the fact that SOA is not only alive and well, but it’s delivering tangible benefits to many organizations. The defining success factor? Implementation approach. Many early adopters of SOA took a top-down approach that fully defined business processes and all governance policies before implementing a single Web service. This approach consumed valuable resources for years before a tangible benefit was ever achieved. At the opposite extreme, other companies take a “bottoms-up” approach, building Web services and technology stacks with no clear vision of where they are headed. Fortunately, there is a third option.

By incorporating easy to use software products developed by Rotla and coupling that with our extensive consulting services and agile management approach, your company will be reaping the benefits of SOA within weeks. These solutions will also be formulated to meet your individual business needs and transform your organization into an agile, service-oriented and collaborative enterprise that operates more efficiently and effectively.

At Rolta, we believe that service-oriented architecture must be designed to serve people. After all, at the end of the day it is people that make or break opportunities and address problems. The implication for your SOA approach is substantial. By involving business users in the design process and delivering value to them quickly, your businesses will be a strong competitor in the market. Our business-driven, incremental approach in combination with powerful development tools also allows you to achieve both of these objectives and begin experiencing the benefits of SOA immediately.

Solution

Building on 20 years of consulting and development expertise, Rolta consultants combine a business-driven, iterative SOA process with the first modular, adaptable SOA platform - iPerspective™. Together, these offerings provide the framework for a directed “bottoms up” approach that substantially mitigates business risk compared to historical SOA implementations. Ultimately, we enable faster, more successful SOA deployments that allow organizations to experience the benefits of SOA Today rather than tomorrow.

Rolta consultants create a user-centric SOA process with powerful implementation tools to enable faster, more successful SOA deployments. Our comprehensive services begin with company-wide education, assessment of your key business user’s needs and establishment of a vision aligned with your corporate strategy. We then guide you through a development process focused on achieving quick wins. We focus on rapid modeling of targeted services to your users, allowing you to “build, try and revise” your way to success. This provides the benefits of SOA in weeks rather than years down the road.

Approach

Our solutions center around:

• SOAToday Services: We guide you through an iterative process with four critical stages; education, assessment/visioning, rapid deployment of targeted web services and process evaluation/refinement.

• iPerspective™ Software: Our 100% standards-compliant tool enables you to create web services in minutes to consolidate access to your data and procedures. By quickly modeling services for users, you can incorporate their feedback and better support agility.

Business Value

The SOAToday methodology uses web services to provide complete, real-time access to all of your organization’s data and related business logic. With the use of iPerspective™, the software technology that automates critical tasks required for SOA solutions, we can help you rapidly implement and deploy prototypes of user applications. Rapid development empowers you to respond quickly to customers, incorporating feedback in minutes instead of hours or days.

Technical View

Technical Issues

The SOA journey has been in progress for more than 20 years now, and many companies are still trying to learn the best way to utilize its capabilities. Business executives don't understand the technology, and those that do have found that implementing solutions can be costly and ineffective. There are also businesses that have just heard the stories about SOA and are hesitant to begin and are unsure on how. Today, SOA is not a quick fix but if it's implemented correctly and used wisely, it can be a very beneficial.

In most companies, programmers are working overtime on creating solutions for all the various technologies to work together. These projects take weeks to months depending on how comprehensive they are. With SOA, the IT organization can partner with the business managers and create real reusable services that will not need continuous and extensive maintenance and will be able to advance the company both technically and competitively in the market.

Another challenge for IT managers is finding creative ways to use technology to make businesses more efficient when their resources are being used to just keep the current systems up to date and running properly. By utilizing SOA, a business can be liberated from the constraints of technology and enabled to make business decisions supported by the technology, not constrained by it.

Through the SOA Today methodology, your business can align your business needs with efficient, reliable and business-oriented technical solutions. Through the SOA Today workshop, our expert consultants can work with your business managers and IT department to understand your business challenges, processes, methods and strengths and determine how best to implement the SOA solutions that meet your individual business needs.

Not only will you receive expert consulting and education in utilizing SOA, Rolta will also supply you with our iPerspective™ software to quickly create SOA web services. Pilot projects built within your own environment, can be accomplished within days to demonstrate the power and simplicity of the product. All implementation including customization is done quickly and efficiently and your company can start to see ROI within days to a few weeks.

Solution Components

SOA Today is an educational tool that exposes your business to the technical sides of SOA. Overall, our expert consultants will work with you through every step of the implementation to make sure the solutions created support your corporate strategy. SOA Today provides your business executives with a functional understanding of SOA and consequently will be in a better position to work diligently with your IT department to create web services that align with your organizations needs.

SOA Today is coupled with the iPerspective™ software to enable modernization of existing legacy systems and assets in rapid manner. Rolta iPerspective™ is a business-oriented technology that allows users to quickly adapt existing architecture to SOA. Rolta iPerspective™ enables this adaptation in minutes from a point-and-click interface, with minimal effort and without re-writing any code. Rolta iPerspective™ automates the process of wrapping packages, procedures, functions, tables and views into services (in a browser-based environment) that can be shared as you zero-in on customer needs. Rolta iPerspective™ exploits industry and open standards, including WS-I. With iPerspective™, you are no longer limited by brittle and exclusionary point-to-point applications or the need to manage multiple sets of the same data.

SOA Jumpstart builds services that can be consumed throughout the enterprise (or beyond). These services are re-usable business-oriented, data-oriented and process-oriented services. SOA Jumpstart will introspect and interrogate ERP, database and custom systems to generate performance-optimized web services out of any object within the existing systems.

Implementation

Rolta has several specific services offerings that can be used to get started with a SOA initiative:

SOA Bootcamp:

• The trained organization will understand how to create a SOA vision and identify the most important objectives that can be achieved through SOA to drive corporate strategy.
• All attendees will be able to clearly articulate and demonstrate the business benefits of SOA within the context of SOA vision and objectives.
• The team will gain practical, hands-on experience with SOA techniques and methodologies.
• Attendees will obtain a credential in SOA from a Rolta Master SOA Architect.

Our intent is to position you and your IT organization for greater impact, building operational credibility and empowering your CIO as an officer of business agility.

SOA Visioning:

• An assessment that gauges an organization's SOA maturity, delivering a comprehensive roadmap, business case and a way forward.
• This engagement also guides an organization to determine the business goals that can be achieved through SOA .

SOA Jumpstart:

• Your organization will create pilot projects that demonstrate immediate value and success. These web services created for you through iPerspective™ can be the starting point for web services that can be utilized in production throughout your enterprise.
• iPerspective™ is 100% Standards-based.
• The team will use SOA to create re-useable services and documentation aligned with business needs.
• When creating these projects, your team will learn how to work with multiple SOA product suites and learn how to bridge all the latest innovations including Clouds, virtualization, SaaS, and Green Computing.

How Does it Fit and Why is it Different?

Rolta empowers your entire organization to become more agile and responsive. Our training and software is unique in the fact that your whole organization will understand SOA and be able to create web services without having to build new skill sets. Rolta is leading the industry by creating easy-to-use software systems like iPerspective™ where your organization can see the value within weeks instead of months or years. Not only is it efficient, but each web service is individually created to meet your own business demands.

Overall, SOA is the wave of the future, and it will be used in all businesses. Our product will reduce your development time from weeks to just a few days and your organization will be set for the future waves of evolving technology.