omniture

Three to Five Years to Go Before SOA Reaches Maturity

2007-10-15 17:14 1595


BEIJING, Oct. 15 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- TongTech Co., Ltd. discusses the development of the SOA market in China, the implementation of their product, TongIntegratorV3.1, and current difficulties arising in China with SOA.

SOA has become a technical buzzword in the IT industry in recent years. Meanwhile, disputes over SOA have been increasing. Especially since early 2007, IT vendors, experts and users have attached growing importance to the development direction of SOA. As for OS, database and other software, SOA-supportive products will go through stages of birth, development and perfection. Products of each stage are designed to meet needs and requirements of contemporary business, while the continued enhancements of products will deliver better solutions and experience to users.

Problems SOA Needs to Solve

The very problem SOA needs to solve is helping enterprises adjust their business to address new market demands in the changing competitive environment. The generation of this concept comes from the hope that foreign users will utilize existing systems to integrate all systems in line with their business needs. SOA is designed to solve some specific problems of each department.

Today as the global market competition becomes increasingly fiercer, the upgrade of systems is faster than what people can imagine. Generally speaking, it takes two to three years to develop a new system, but this could not catch up with the market as new demand appears quickly. Therefore, SOA emerges as the times require. SOA can help reorganize current processes to meet the needs and requirements of the market without replacing the existing system.

TongTech Develops SOA-based TongIntegratorV3.1

TongIntegratorV3.1 is a SOA-based platform specially designed to help solve integration problems. This platform can deliver series of flexible and subsequent changes to users. With the launch of TongIntegratorV3.1, TongTech has become synchronous with the world in SOA area. TongIntegratorV3.1 is a real SOA product, and TongTech has kept improving it according to user feedback.

As a maturely integrated middleware product, TongIntegratorV3.1 demonstrates its true value through its seamless combination of the ideals of SOA. It is equipped with the powerful data integration capability, showing outstanding performance in data collection and processing, data integration and application between different systems and formats. TongIntegratorV3.1 centers on services, offering a detailed description of services, the capability of assembling services and real-time monitoring over the operation of services. TongIntegratorV3.1 is featured with many new technologies, such as embedded ESB (enterprise service bus), support for collaborative team development, J2EE-based standards, components and services-distributed deployment and operation, etc. All these changes benefit from the fact that TongIntegratorV3.1 is a SOA and J2EE application server-based applications service integration software platform. It not only gets aligned with the SOA tendency but also brings tangible benefits to users. It can be used to create manageable, extensible and practical EAI solutions, solving major problems on integration and application service platforms. It also provides simple, economical and extensible methodologies and tools, making the whole process of business integration easier through flexible services.

In the entire middleware industry, the products that have really integrated SOA technology were launched at the end of 2006. Although encapsulation and improvements had been made for the first batch of SOA products, users found it quite inconvenient to use them. Judging from the current overall technical level, SOA is still in its initial stages, and many standards needs improvements and complementation. In April this year, the SCA/SDO technical standard came into effect. The standard standardizes the assembly and interface of services and defines the description and assembly of service components, laying a solid foundation for the realization and broad adoption of SOA.

The drafting of a standard is of great importance for both software providers and users. With an open standard, users will have more options, and the exchangeability of products from different vendors can be guaranteed. For instance, when the user feels uncomfortable at a product, he can turn to products of other vendors. As long as these products are based on the same standards, it is not a big problem for users to migrate from one product to another without creating a new system for new products. Take cell phone chargers for example. Not long ago it was quite inconvenient to use different cell phones as each kind of cell phone had unique chargers. But things have changed now. With a unified interface, cell phones are easier to use and this can save a lot of resources.

SOA involves many complicated technologies. Its standards are comprised of multiple standards, which still need further improvement themselves. Meanwhile, new standards will be added into the current ones. The definition of a process and the description of a service are a time-consuming process. Judging from the present software market, SOA is undoubtedly in the development direction. However, there is still a long way to go before SOA is turned into a major realization method for applications.

Up until now, TongTech TongIntegratorV3.1 has been adopted by only a small number of customers. The emergency response system being implemented in the Maritime Safety Administration of China is based on the SOA platform. If it goes live successfully, it will become the largest and the most complicated application of SOA technology in China.

The core part of the maritime emergency response assistant system is the application integration platform. In this pilot project, TongIntegratorV3.1, deployed at MRCCs in the headquarters, Shanghai, Shandong and Shenzhen, constitutes the maritime information exchange platform. The integration and sharing of emergency response data of the Maritime Safety Administration is achieved through the application integration platform.

The Adoption of SOA in China

At present, the application of SOA centers on data integration, which is easier to achieve. The business processes must be combed clearly if users want to integrate SOA with business processes, as changes of business processes will lead to changes in management and administration, influencing the internal structure of the enterprises. Therefore, users and IT companies prefer to start from data integration, which is practically easier to manage.

The application of SOA is still at the beginning stage. For most Chinese organizations, the task of top priority is to solve basic business problems, categorize business of enterprises or government bodies, know what needs to be shared, comb business execution processes and have a clear understanding of the whole business model. SOA is the direction of the middleware market, but the implementation process is time-consuming, calling for sound efforts. TongTech has closely followed foreign companies and positioned itself on the same starting line with them, which is certainly something to be proud of.

Considering the present application of SOA in China, TongTech has a sober understanding of the actual needs of the Chinese market. Based on the actual needs of Chinese users and making full use of its product and geographical advantages, TongTech has developed products that users really want and provided them with professional support and services.

Three to Five Years to Go before SOA Reaches Maturity

SOA is an overwhelming development direction, but is still three to five years away from reaching true maturity. It will take about three years to integrate the market as most industries are still at the initial stage of applying information technology. It is expected with the broader adoption of information technology in various industries across China, the SOA application will reach the peak by 2010. TongTech will make good use of these three to five years to better incorporate advanced technologies into its products, making its SOA products more mature and attractive.

Source: TongTech Co., Ltd.
collection