May 9, 2006

Overall, the rapid acceptance of the SOA Framework (Service Oriented Architecture) is accelerating some dramatic changes in the way that B2B companies are deploying enterprise solutions to various markets.

Organizations are gaining competitive advantage by introducing new and unique business solutions that are dynamic, different and allow for the flexibility to change quickly, as the business demands.

The organizations that are adopting the service oriented architecture framework are developing unique applications that link together the right parts of multiple applications in the right way to initiate a new business practice, without having to start from scratch.

This new application is called a composite application and most composite applications on the market are custom built for the organization with a web services interface. According to Forrester, "Composite applications bring the pieces together, leveraging business process definitions to increase the flexibility and agility of enterprise applications."

The availability of composite applications is providing the competitive advantage that organizations need to survive in the current competitive landscape.

After the composite applications are developed, deploying the applications to testing and ultimately to the production environment throughout the world is the next major challenge organizations are facing.

While organizations who have chosen to invest in service oriented architectures have acquired the expertise to develop composite, or web, applications, very few organizations have invested in the appropriate tools to manage the composite applications after they have been developed.

Most organizations still rely on manual error prone processes to deploy, or provision, these new composite applications out into the production environment.

So how are you going to deliver these composite applications, or web services, to the end user? You can no longer rely on old processes to solve the problem.

Typical provisioning tools being used today provide the ability to provision operating system images, patches and changes to packaged applications. Since these environments are fairly static, the legacy tools are adequate in packaged application environments because the amount of change is limited.

However, organizations adopting SOA frameworks, built upon a composite application model, need new infrastructure solutions built specifically to handle the unique characteristics, such as frequent change, of composite applications. According to Gartner, "SOA implementation projects typically suffer from a lack of tools, standards and consistency." Therefore, it is clear that a standard and consistent approach to provisioning composite applications is needed.

Most organizations that are beginning to provision composite applications are doing so by utilizing inefficient and expensive manual processes.

Typically IT operations are given the application code from application developers and from there, IT writes custom scripts for every change that needs to be deployed.

This manual process cannot possibly keep up with the demands of the new composite application model because the changes are too frequent, causing an IT bottleneck.

The manual provisioning process takes too long and requires too much lead time, there is no way to track where and when the changes occur and most importantly there is no way to rollback in case the provisioning process is not successful.

In order to meet the demands of the new business built around service oriented architectures and composite applications, organizations need to adopt an automated solution that ensures all composite application artifacts are deployed in a consistent and repeatable fashion.

An automated solution can lead to efficiency, cost reduction and an enhanced customer experience.

This automated solution should standardize the way code, content, and configuration changes to composite applications are aggregated, synchronized, and deployed throughout testing, staging, and production environments.

Ideally a standard solution should work with your current source code, content and configuration systems so one tool can be used to pull from all of these development environments and push the content out to web servers throughout the world.

This standard approach could increase efficiency and significantly reduce the costs associated with managing and provisioning changes in the test and production environments.

In addition, the standard solution would provide a repeatable process and audit trail to meet IT compliance and governance needs.

Each composite application change would be aggregated from code, content and configuration environments into a single repository where the changes are synchronized and stored, for auditing and tracking purposes, and then deployed out into web application servers to be made available to the customers.

In order to meet governance and compliance regulations this type of solutions needs to be scalable enough to meet even the largest organizations and ensure that all changes go-live in unison to all servers throughout the world.

Ideally the solution would provide out of the box connectors for the standard source code management, web content and target servers to ensure integration into the current application environment.

In addition, should an error occur with the deployment, the changes should be able to be rolled back quickly to the last known good state of the application, thereby not affecting application availability.

With a standardized and automated approach organizations can bring their composite applications to market faster, meet the needs of the service oriented architecture and ultimately improve the end-user customer experience.

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