Service-oriented architecture is taking hold in the government as a model for the information technology networks of the future, and vendors and contractors are positioning themselves to take advantage of it.
Broadly speaking, SOA is the use of open standards to link applications from many vendors, leading to an enterprisewide IT structure that avoids the isolated silos that have plagued large organizations for decades. The open standards allow customers to pay less attention to whom they’re buying hardware from and instead emphasize performance and cost.
The concept is exciting and promising, but market analysts say its openness can make it a tough sell because it takes away the advantage of proprietary software for vendors trying to confine customers to a single brand.
“I think the computer science conversations are finished, meaning that people have made up their minds that the right way to architect systems is the way implied by service-oriented architecture,” said Dave McQueeney, chief technology officer at IBM Corp.’s federal division. “Now [the need] is to flow the information down to people in operational positions.”
IBM created the Federal SOA Institute to provide some of that understanding and education.
Another obstacle is the way agencies buy technology, McQueeney said. The traditional approach is to break an acquisition into small components and try to buy each one separately rather than seeing the whole puzzle at once.
“If you break things into smaller pieces than it makes sense to do, you end up spending more money gluing the pieces back together,” McQueeney said.
The SOA concept is not new, he added.
However, in the past, the computational power that could provide the kind of agility such a system needed wasn’t available. Information silos grew not because people thought that walling off their information was a good idea but because it was the only practical approach in many cases, he said.
Now SOA is possible. “In the end, it becomes simple,” McQueeney said. “The technology became powerful enough that it almost stepped out of the way and went behind a curtain.” Although the technology is ready, the market is only slowly taking shape, said Deniece Peterson, a senior analyst at the Input Executive Program. “The growth of SOA in the federal government is happening gradually and incrementally,” she said.
Since 2003, SOA has appeared by name in only 65 to 70 opportunities out of the thousands in Input’s database, she said. However, the greatest number of those appeared in the past couple of years, suggesting that more agencies are adopting SOA.
“A lot is happening at the task-order level, so we’re not necessarily seeing tons of the big opportunities,” she said.
Peterson predicted that contractors will eventually be expected to offer SOA-ready solutions, though she couldn’t say how long it would take for that approach to become the norm.
Sun Microsystems Inc. has demonstrated its commitment to open source and SOA by making almost all of its products open source in the past few years, said Bill Vass, president of Sun’s federal division.
To make SOA adoption easier, Sun has implemented features such as dynamic tracing, which allows operators to quickly pinpoint the source of a software problem without having to take the system out of production for debugging. Sun also indemnifies its open-source software, meaning that if someone claims to be the author of a program and demands payment, the user is protected against any liability.
Furthermore, SOA implementations let users engage in activities such as pulling bits of information about a person from several databases — regardless of who created the databases — to assemble a temporary, comprehensive view of that person.
“Can you imagine the politics behind trying to create a centralized database?” Vass asked. “Instead of fighting that battle, you have an SOA that can pull the information together and not store it, just pull it together for that one view.”
However, proprietary systems — the foundations of information silos — are not likely to disappear anytime soon, he added.
“I can’t see any reason in the long term why you would go with a proprietary system,” Vass said. “On the other side of the coin, there are a lot of great proprietary systems out there that can meet your needs.”
Michael Hardy (mhardy@1105govinfo.com) is an associate editor at Washington Technology.
