A NEW SERVICE-ORIENTED

ARCHITECTURE (SOA)
MATURITY MODEL

Copyright © 2006. All rights reserved.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

> Foreword 2

> 1.0 Introduction and Motivation 3

> 2.0 What is SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture)? 5

> 3.0 The SOA Maturity Model 7

3.1 SOA Maturity Level 1 — Initial Services 10

3.2 SOA Maturity Level 2 — Architected Services 12

3.3 SOA Maturity Level 3 — Business and Collaborative Services 14

3.4 SOA Maturity Level 4 — Measured Business Services 18

3.5 SOA Maturity Level 5 — Optimized Business Services 20

> 4.0 Conclusion 21

> Appendix: Key Contributors 22

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 1

> FOREWORD This whitepaper and the model it presents was created to better enable organizations in their
quest for business agility through service oriented architecture (SOA). The SOA Maturity Model
outlined in this paper was specifically developed to offer guidance to managers who may be
struggling to communicate the business value of their SOA vision and to be able to benchmark
SOA adoption within their organization.

We look forward to receiving feedback and commentary on this model, as we will continue to
expand its content and share SOA successes. Enjoy!

2 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

In an environment where the strategic value of IT is questioned1 and the pressure is on for every IT > 1.0
and software development organization to cut costs, even the discussion of the strategic business INTRODUCTION
value of technology can get lost. Much attention has been devoted to methods of reducing costs AND MOTIVATION
such as outsourcing and offshoring, but less attention has been focused on the business enable-
ment value of new technology.

The goal of this paper is to show how a new approach to designing and deploying information
technology, specifically service oriented architecture (SOA), can form the basis for the technology
and business organizations to work in concert for the improvement of business performance along
several dimensions including cost reduction and streamlining the implementation of new business
models. More specifically, this paper provides:

> A framework for discussion that enables an organization to understand what the path toward
adopting a SOA should be.
> An articulation of the business benefits of successful migration towards SOA, divided into
multiple levels of maturity of SOA implementation.
> A meaningful vocabulary and context around which an organization may seek alignment
between IT and the Business.
> The basis upon which an organization may build a roadmap towards true business agility
through successful adoption of SOA

SOA is an approach to designing, implementing, and deploying information systems such that the
system is created from components implementing discrete business functions. These components,
called “Services”, can be distributed across geography, across enterprises, and can be reconfig-
ured into new business processes as needed.

All claims for new technology are subject to skepticism, so what makes SOA different from other
approaches of the past? The key factors are:

> SOA is built on the standards of the World Wide Web leading to cost-effective implementations
on a global basis with broad support by vendors.
> Services are “loosely-coupled” allowing for much more flexibility than older technologies with
respect to re-using and re-combining the services to create new business functions both within
and across enterprises.
> SOA best practices create designs which embody business processes— and enhance the ability
to outsource and extend processes to business partners.
> SOA encompasses legacy (i.e. existing) systems and processes so that the usefulness of existing
investments can be preserved and even increased.

1
Carr, Nicholas G., Does IT Matter?, Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 3

 This combination of factors makes SOA an approach which provides a winning strategy for all
stakeholders as:

> The finance organization sees cost effectiveness.

> The business organization sees enhanced and expanding business models (as shown later in
examples).
> The IT organization sees success in supporting their customers, meeting service goals, and
having the flexibility to respond to future demands through increased agility.
> Corporate governance sees improved alignment of IT and business.

As companies look to the challenge of figuring out how to obtain the benefits of SOA, how to jus-
tify the required investments, where to begin, and what vision to aim for, guidance is required.
The solution presented in this paper is the introduction of a SOA Maturity Model (SOA MM) to
show the increasingly positive impact which SOA adoption can have from a business perspective.
The SOA MM derives from three key inspirations:

> The successes of the Capability Maturity Model® (CMM) and newer CMM Integration
(CMMISM)2 from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in providing a common framework for
defining and assessing process improvement in software and other engineering endeavors.
> Papers such as those by Randy Heffner of Forrester Research3 showing the various successful
paths taken by companies introducing SOA.
> The success of our customers in the deployment of SOA projects.

By putting SOA into a framework similar to the Capability Maturity Model®, we can show the
goals, characteristics, and prerequisites to SOA’s business impact progressing through levels as
follows:

New Cost Business Business Business

Functionality Reduction Responsiveness Transformation Optimization

The SOA MM includes goals, characterization of the scope and business benefits of each level,
the important industry standards, key practices, and critical success factors, both technological
and organizational. The SOA MM thus provides guidance to set SOA vision and a benchmark to
measure progress.

Forrester Research has found that companies approach SOA through different paths, each with
different business benefits, skills, and technology infrastructure requirements. For some compa-
nies a focus on internal integration and workflow is most important, while for others a focus on
partner integration is most important. As companies pursue the specific paths appropriate to their
needs, they can correlate their paths with the maturity model to see the organizational needs,
technology needs, and goals as they move up the levels of SOA maturity.

2
Software Engineering Institute, Capability Maturity Model® Integration, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi.
3
Heffner, Randy, “Your Paths to Service-Oriented Architecture”, Forrester Research, Dec. 2004.

4 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

SOA is an evolution of distributed computing designed to allow the interaction of software compo- > 2.0
nents, called “services”, across a network. Applications are created from a composition of these WHAT IS SOA
services — and importantly, the services can be shared among multiple applications. (SERVICE-ORIENTED
ARCHITECTURE)?
For example, a Human Resources management application could be created from the following services:

> An Employee Administration Service to manage hiring, changes in status, and termination.
> A Salary and Review Administration Service to manage salaries and employee performance
reviews according to corporate standards.
> A Benefits Administration Service to initiate and terminate benefits, and to process the annual
enrollments.
> An IT Security and Provisioning Service to manage the addition and removal of access rights for
employees according to their role and employee status.
> A Payroll Service provided securely over the Internet by an outside provider.
> An HR Department Portal Service providing a web browser based user interface for members of
the HR department presenting the functions of the above services.
> A Business Process Management Service to manage the approval and notification processes.

With SOA, organizations can achieve greater reuse of existing assets and can respond faster to
change requests. These benefits are attributed to several critical elements of SOA:

> The services reflect logical business activities. Each service typically performs multiple
operations for a specific business function such as a Payroll Service providing operations includ-
ing “issue checks”, “issue W2s”, and “provide payroll period report”. Importantly, these services,
often referred to as “course-grained”, reflect business process concepts, not the capabilities or
“fine-grained” API’s defined by traditional packaged software applications.
> New services can be added or created by composing existing services without impacting
the existing service implementations 4. So, in the example above, an Employee Self-Service
component could be added making use of the existing services, filtering data and operations to
those appropriate for the self-service users. This allows for an “incremental deployment” approach
in implementing services.
> The services can be on heterogeneous systems across networks and geography providing
platform independence and location transparency. There is no need for each service to be
implemented using the same software or hardware technology nor to be on the same network or in
the same location. The Salary and Review Administration Service could be implemented in a COBOL
environment on a Linux/mainframe server in one locale while the IT Security and Provisioning Service
could be implemented in a Microsoft .NET environment on a Windows server in a different locale.
> The services communicate by standard protocols providing broad interoperability. Most
commonly, especially for connecting heterogeneous systems, these are protocols based on
World Wide Web standards. “Web services” are the implementations of services using these
standards. Amazon and eBay are high-profile examples of corporations which have made their
core applications accessible over the Internet as Web services.

4
Care must be taken with respect to security and service level agreements (SLA) when adding new “consumers” to existing services.

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 5

 > Legacy application systems can be integrated as a service leveraging existing investments.
SOA technology provides mechanisms to front-end (or “wrap”) existing systems behind a services
interface with no changes to the existing system. In addition traditional ERP vendors are quickly
exposing their applications’ functionality as Web services.
> Services have an interface and are message-oriented. The functionality provided by services is
defined by meta-data describing the interface to the service and its operations. Information is transmit-
ted to and from services as messages. The focus in the definition of the interface and messages is in
“what” a service does rather than “how”. The “how” is internal to the implementation of the service.
SOA applications are usually designed to be “event-driven” responding to the messages as they arrive.

An implementation of SOA relies on skills, methods, and a SOA infrastructure to support the SOA
application in a reliable, scalable, and secure manner. Some of the basic elements of this new
approach include:

> Analysis, design, and implementation methodologies to guide project managers, develop-
ers, and IT operations personnel in the rapid design, assembly, and reuse of SOA components.
> Modeling, configuration, testing and deployment tools to specify and create the services
and then define business processes which orchestrate those lower level services into coarse
grained business services.
> Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 5 to provide reliable, scalable, distributed communications and
data transformations between services as well as providing adapters to legacy technology and
various vendor implementations.
> Services and Policy Registry and Repository to provide a common place to organize, under-
stand and manage SOA information including a catalog of available services, their interface
definitions, and policies governing the use of services.
> Provisioning and Infrastructure Management Tools to provide Business Process Visibility
(BPV) across a widely distributed SOA infrastructure.
> Runtime Governance to define and control security and business policies and enforce regulatory
compliance across tiers of software in a way which reflects the underlying business processes.

5
Chappell, David, Enterprise Service Bus, O’Reilly, 2004.

6 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The introduction of SOA can provide a focus for the technology and business organization in a > 3.0
company to meet common goals of the enterprise. A SOA Maturity Model can provide goals and THE SOA
guidance on how SOA can have an increasingly positive impact on the enterprise. MATURITY MODEL

Figure 1 shows the five levels of SOA Maturity along with the key business impact progressing
from least to most mature as follows: Initial Services, Architected Services, Business Services and
Collaborative Services (two different focuses at level 3), Measured Business Services, and
Optimized Business Services. Also shown for reference are the corresponding CMMISM levels6.

Figure 1: Service-Oriented Architecture Maturity Model

Levels with Key Business Impact

Optimized Optimization
CMMISM: Business
Optimizing Services

CMMISM: Measured Business Transformation

Quantitatively Services
Managed

Business Collaborative Responsiveness

CMMISM: Services Services
Defined

Architected Services Cost Effectiveness

CMMISM:
Managed

Initial Services Functionality

CMMISM:
Performed

Table 1 shows the key attributes of each maturity level including business impact, scope, critical
success factors, and relevant standards. Consistent with the approach taken by the SEI for the
Capability Maturity Model®, Key Goals and Practices for each SOA maturity level are specified in
Table 2. Attainment of these goals and the implementation of these practices is the measure as to
whether a maturity level has been attained. Each maturity level has as a prerequisite the goals and
practices of the lower levels.

It will often be the case that particular goals will be achieved, practices implemented, and tech-
nologies used at levels lower than those shown in Tables 1 and 2. This is to be expected and
encouraged according to the priorities of the enterprise.

Subsequent sections will examine each of the SOA maturity levels.

6
In very short summary: CMMISM Performed means that needed functions are performed, CMMISM Defined means that standard processes
are defined, CMMISM Managed means that the standard processes are implemented and managed, CMMISM Quantitatively Managed
means that the results of the processes are measured against goals, CMMISM Optimizing means that there is a continuous improvement
process implemented based on the measurements.

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 7

Table 1: SOA Maturity Model

Critical People &

Prime Business Organizational Selected Relevant
Maturity Level Benefits Scope Critical Technology Success Factors Success Factors Standards

1. Initial Services New functionality R&D experimenta- Standards, Legacy Integration Developers learn XML, XSLT, WSDL,
tion, Pilot projects service development SOAP, J2EE, .NET
Web site, Portal, skills
Custom integrations,
Small number Developer Manager
of services Sponsorship

2. Architected IT cost reduction and Multiple integrated Support for heterogeneity and distributed Architecture group UDDI, WS-
Services control applications systems, Reliable Messaging, Mediation, provides leadership, ReliableMessaging,
Ease of deployment, Database integration, SOA Competency WS-Policy, WS-
Versioning, Internal Security, Performance Center Addressing, XQuery,
management WS-Security, SAML
CIO Sponsorship

3.a. Business Business responsive- Business processes Reuse, Ease of modification, Availability, IT Partnership with WS-BPEL
Services ness — change busi- across business unit Business process rules, Event-driven Business, Partnership
ness processes quickly or enterprise processes, Composite applications across Organizations,
and effectively SOA Life-cycle
Governance,
3.b. Collaborative Business responsive- Services available External services enablement, Cross-enter- Executive commit- RosettaNet, ebXML,
Services ness — collaboration to external partners, prise security, Translation of cross-enterprise ment, Event-driven WS-Trust
with business and Cross-enterprise protocols, Long-running transactions design skills
trading partners
Business Unit
Manager Sponsorship

4. Measured Business transforma- Business unit Business Activity Monitoring, Event Stream On-going business
Business tion from reactive to or enterprise, Processing, Complex Event Processing, process evaluation
Services real-time, Meet busi- Cross-enterprise Event-driven dashboards and alerts and response
ness performance
metrics CFO Sponsorship

5. Optimized Business optimization Business unit Event-driven automation for optimization Continuous improve-
Business — react and respond or enterprise, ment culture
Services automatically Cross-enterprise
CEO Sponsorship

8 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

 Table 2: SOA Maturity Model Goals and Key Practices

Maturity Level Key Goals Key Practices

1. Initial Services 1. Learn SOA technology in R&D and pilot 1. Create services definitions.
projects. 2. Integrate SOA into project development
2. Apply SOA technology to immediate methodology.
organizational needs. 3. Quantify costs, time, and business
3. Define initial ROI measurements for SOA benefits of pilot projects.
projects and apply to initial projects.

2. Architected 1. Institutionalize use of SOA. 1. Specify technology standards for SOA.

Services 2. Put in place architecture leadership 2. Integrate SOA into organization-wide
for SOA. development process.
3. Prove returns from use of standards 3. Provide organization-wide SOA training
technology. and competency center.
4. Anticipate use of SOA information for 4. Use incremental integration.
business optimization.

3.a. Business 1. Create ongoing partnership between 1. Specify policies for use of SOA in creation
Services business and technology organizations or modification of business processes.
for SOA governance. 2. Take advantage of event-oriented and
2. Support full business processes via SOA. mediation functionality of SOA technolo-
3. Prove returns from reuse of services and gies, especially with regards to enhancing/
responsiveness to change. extending business processes.

3.b. Collaborative 1. Create ongoing partnership between 1. Specify policies for use of SOA in
Services business and technology organizations collaboration with business and trading
for SOA governance. partners
2. Extend SOA business processes to 2. Implement cross-enterprise security.
external organizations
3. Prove returns from use of services for
collaboration.

4. Measured 1. Institute transformation from reactive 1. Collect and analyze business process-
Business to real-time business processes. oriented real-time performance metrics.
Services 2. Define and meet business-oriented 2. Implement ongoing business process
performance metrics. evaluation and re-engineering.

5. Optimized 1. Provide enterprise-wide leadership for 1. Implement self-correcting business

Business business and SOA governance. processes.
Services 2. Prove returns from SOA-supported
continuous improvement.

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 9

> 3.1 SOA Maturity Level 1 is Initial Services (see Table 1 and Table 2). Initial Services represent the initial
SOA MATURITY learning and initial project phase of SOA adoption. Projects here are typically done to simultaneously
LEVEL 1 — meet a specific need to implement functionality while trying out specific technologies and an
INITIAL SERVICES approach to SOA. This maturity level also includes initial R&D activities testing the SOA technologies
in a laboratory environment. Usually, the initial introduction of SOA is driven by the application
development organization—often as part of an application integration project. New development
skills are learned and initial attempts at quantification of ROI are created.

This is the level at which the most basic of SOA standards from W3C7 are introduced such as XML for
definition of message formats, WSDL for service interface definition and SOAP for invocation of services.

A typical example of an initial services project as shown in Figure 2 is to link a corporate sales
force Web portal directly to both a legacy sales forecasting system running on the mainframe and
a new CRM application exposed as a Web service. In this example the following SOA infrastruc-
ture component could be used:

> A Mainframe Integration Service such as DataDirect’s Shadow RTE providing bidirectional
standards-based Web service access to a legacy sales forecasting system hosted within CICS
on an IBM mainframe running z/OS.
> A Highly-Productive Development Platform optimized for the creation of service-oriented
business applications such as Progress OpenEdge to develop and host new CRM application
logic that is accessible as Web services.

Figure 2: Example Application for Maturity Level 1: Initial

Sales
Management PORTAL USER
Portal INTERNET
Server

Services PORTAL USER

Interface

REQUEST REPLY

INTRANET

Services Services
Interface Interface

Sales New
MAINFRAME Forecasting CRM BUSINESS-ORIENT
HOSTED and Tracking Application WEB SERVICES
Service

7
World Wide Web Consortium, “Web Services Activity”, http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/.

10 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The key benefits of this initial project are to provide the business functionality required while also
learning how to develop and deploy a basic SOA application. Such an implementation would use
the SOAP protocol between the portal server and the supporting services, as well as for the Sales
Forecasting and Tracking Service to obtain information from the CRM Application.

However, even a basic initial application could benefit from using some of the key additional SOA
infrastructure components. Beyond the learning gained from using the technologies early, the most
important reason for the introduction of these advanced technologies on initial projects is to put in
place scalable technology so that as SOA encompasses more business functions, the right founda-
tions are in place. For example, Figure 3 shows this same example with the addition of:

> A Runtime Governance Service such as Actional’s which provides the monitoring and control
mechanism to apply service and security policies to all steps within a business process across
heterogeneous SOA infrastructure elements.
> An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) such as Sonic’s ESB which provides a standard interaction
model for SOA components including Web services and relational databases as a scalable,
easy-to-deploy distributed infrastructure. The ESB provides a large number of adapters to allow
services implemented in disparate technologies to interchange messages allowing, for example,
a .NET application to communicate with a J2EE application at a services level.
> A Services Registry supporting the UDDI standard. This provides a central store of service def-
initions across initial projects and provides a single point of reference for service developers to
obtain services definitions.

Figure 3: Enhanced SOA Infrastructure for SOA Maturity Level 1: Initial

Sales
Management PORTAL USER
Services Portal INTERNET
Registry Server

Services Services PORTAL USER

Interface Interface

Enterprise Service Bus

ADMINISTRATOR

Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface

Runtime Sales New

INTRANET Governance Forecasting CRM
Service and Tracking Application
Service

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 11

> 3.2 SOA Maturity Level 2 is Architected Services (see Table 1 and Table 2). It is at this level that stan-
SOA MATURITY dards are set as to the technical governance of SOA implementation, typically under leadership of
LEVEL 2 — the architecture organization. The key business benefit of this level is development and deployment
ARCHITECTED cost reductions through the use of SOA standard infrastructure and components as compared to
SERVICES using older technologies or costs accumulated through multiple unique one-time projects. These
benefits are greater in the heterogeneous environments typical of most enterprises.

Based on the learning and feedback from the initial services at Maturity Level 1, architectural stan-
dards and standard implementation technologies are defined. For example, standards are set for:

> Enterprise SOA protocols to be used chosen from industry standards, particularly those of W3C,
OASIS8 and WS-I9.
> Implementation platforms to be used.
> Policies including reuse, runtime governance, compliance and security policies.
> Technical review process for definition of new services and reuse of existing services.

Figure 4 shows an example of an SOA deployment at Maturity Level 2 for a financial trading
example. Maturity Level 2 includes the use of key components shown previously in Figure 3
including the runtime governance service and the Enterprise Service Bus as well as the additional
key aspects of this example:

> A Repository which extends the Services Registry to provide storage for SOA artifacts and
policies information. Lifecycle support such as access controls, versioning and deployment tools
are also important characteristics to consider here. Usage of such a repository with both devel-
opment and runtime support is part of Maturity Level 2—Architected Services.
> A modified Runtime Governance Service, which identifies services and dependencies pro-
viding the proper foundation to detect, diagnose and automatically remedy both system and
application-level errors.
> A Message Transformation Service which allows the integration of services with differ-
ences in expected message contents or formats. This is often done by the invocation of XLST
transforms applied to an XML message—in this example as a “mediation” function under the
control of the ESB.
> A Single Sign-On Service supporting user authentication and authorization across the organiza-
tion. Such a service, typically supplied by a vendor, could be based on the OASIS SAML standard
for the exchange of authentication and authorization information.

8
OASIS, “OASIS Committees by Category: Web Services and SOA”, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_cat.php?cat=ws.
9
WS-I, Web Services Interoperability Organization, http://ws-i.org.

12 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

 Figure 4: Example Application for SOA Maturity Level 2: Architected Services

STOCK
Single Sign On EXCHANGE

Trading ECN
Repository User System
Directory

Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface

Enterprise Service Bus XML

Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface
ADMINISTRATOR

Runtime Order Funds

INTRANET
Governance Management Transfer
Service Service Service

AGENT

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 13

> 3.3 The focus of SOA Maturity Level 3 is on the partnership between technology and business organiza-
SOA MATURITY tions in order to assure that the use of SOA provides clear business responsiveness. Core to the
LEVEL 3 — value of SOA is the linkage between business processes and digital processes as shown in Figure 5.
BUSINESS
SERVICES AND Figure 5: SOA’s Source of Power: It Models Business Processes
COLLABORATIVE (adapted from Forrester Research10)
SERVICES
PHYSICAL Create Reserve Schedule
WORLD Customer Inventory Production
Order
Create
Shipping
Order
Sample
Create
Process Schedule
Supplier
Shipment
Order

Services
Correlate to
DIGITAL Process Steps
WORLD
Service Delivery Network

Digital Create Create Create

Reserve Schedule Schedule
Services Customer Shipping Supplier
Inventory Shipment Production
Order Order Order

Digital
Services Call
Processes Initiates
Digital Processes

SOA Maturity Level 3 is defined with two complementary paths to attaining these goals—one,
Business Services, focused on the improvement of internal business processes, and one, Collaborative
Services, focused on the improvement of collaborative processes with external partners, (see Table 1
and Table 2). Certainly both can be done to get the greatest advantage from SOA, but Maturity Level 3
can be attained through either path—both provide improved business responsiveness.

10
“The Big Strategic Impact Of Organic Business And Service-Oriented Architecture”, Forrester Research, Inc., June 2004.

14 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

Figure 6 shows an example of an SOA deployment at Maturity Level 3 for financial trading. Key to
this Business Services implementation is:

> Business Process Management (BPM) —the management of long-running processes

involving sequential messages between services. This could be done for example by Sonic
Orchestration Server which can manage the state of each process along with intermediate
results.

Figure 6: Example Application for SOA Maturity Level 3: Business Services

STOCK
Single Sign On EXCHANGE

Orchestration Trading ECN

Repository User Service System
Directory

Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface

3
4
Enterprise Service Bus XML

1 2

Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface

Runtime Call Order Funds

Governance Center Management Transfer
Service Service Service Service

AGENT

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 15

 Figure 7 continues the evolution of Business Services with the addition of:

> Straightforward enhancement of business processes. A principal advantage of SOA is it’s

enablement of business process modification through the reconfiguration of services. In this
example, a new Compliance Service required for regulatory compliance is inserted in the message
flow between the Order Management Service and the Trading Service without any changes to the
implementations of the existing services.
> Reuse of services. In this example, reuse is shown as through a multi-channel application
(e.g. provide access to the same application through different customer communication meth-
ods) in which the Order Management Service is shared by both the Call Center Service and the
Online Service.

Figure 7: Continued Evolution of Application for

SOA Maturity Level 3: Business Services STOCK
EXCHANGE

Single
Sign On
Orchestration Compliance Trading ECN
Repository
User
Service Service System
Directory

Services Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface Interface

3 4
2 5
Enterprise Service Bus XML

Services Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface Interface

Online
Runtime Service Call Order Funds
Governance Center Management Transfer
Service Service Service Service

INTERNET
AGENT

CUSTOMERS

16 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The alternative focus at Maturity Level 3 is Collaborative Services with a focus on linking with
external partners. Figure 8 shows an example where the trading company expanded into a new
business of foreign exchange transactions offered over the Internet.

Key features in this implementation of Collaboration Services include:

> Use of standard SOA protocols supporting specific business-to-business (B2B) functionality
such as those defined by RosettaNet11 which includes standard XML messaging functions for such
cross-enterprise operations as obtaining product information, obtaining inventory information, and
ordering.
> A Collaboration Service would implement the B2B protocols and supports necessary transfor-
mations between the messages used internal to the enterprise and those needed for external
processes.
> The Electronic Crossing Network (ECN) connection has moved from a proprietary protocol to a
standard industry services protocol and hence is managed through the Collaboration Service.

Figure 8: SOA Maturity Level 3: Collaboration Services

ECN

STOCK
EXCHANGE Services INTERNET
Interface

Foreign FOREIGN
Orchestration Compliance Trading Exchange Collaboration EXCHANGE
User
Repository Service Service System Service Service PARTNERS
Directory

Services Services Services Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface Interface Interface Interface

Enterprise Service Bus

Services Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface Interface

Online
Runtime Service Call Order Funds
Governance Center Management Transfer
Service Service Service Service

INTERNET
AGENT

CUSTOMERS

11
RosettaNet, ”Standards”, http://rosettanet.org/standards.

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 17

> 3.4 While SOA Maturity Level 3 focuses on the implementation of internal and/or external business
SOA MATURITY processes, SOA Maturity Level 4 focuses on measuring and presenting these processes at the
LEVEL 4 — business level so as to provide continuous feedback on the performance and business impact of
MEASURED the processes implemented at Level 3 (see Table 1 and Table 2).
BUSINESS
SERVICES Figure 9 shows an example process to configure, order and manufacture, with services for each
key function distributed across geographic locations.

Key features in this example are:

> Real-time Event Stream Processing which in this example collects all RFID events into an
event database and filters out the business-meaningful events based on rules and forwards
them on for use in other services. As explained in The Power of Events12 and “Event Stream
Processing—A New Physics of Software”13, event stream processing and “complex event
processing” allows the transformation of business processes from being reactive to being
based on real-time intelligence.
> Business Process Visibility (BPV) which empowers you to manage your SOA from a business
process perspective. BPV allows business and IT users to gain a comprehensive view of individ-
ual business processes and their supporting business services and IT infrastructure, while
simultaneously enforcing policies at the business process level.

12
Luckham, David, The Power of Events, Addison-Wesley, 2002.
13
Palmer, Mark, “Event Stream Processing - A New Physics of Software”, DM Direct Newsletter, July 29, 2005,
http://www.dmreview.com/editorial/newsletter_archive.cfm?nl=dmdirect&issueid=20226.

18 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

 Figure 9: Example Application for SOA Maturity Level 4:
Measured Business Services

RFID Event
Stream Plant RFID
Processing Materials and
Fulfillment
Engine In-Process
Service
Repository RULES Tracking
Event Service
DB

Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface

Meaningful Events All Events

Enterprise Enterprise
Service Bus Service Bus

Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface

Business CUSTOMER
Runtime Configure
Governance Process
and Order INTERNET
Service Visibility
Service
(BPV) Service
CUSTOMER

INTRANET
MANAGER

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 19

> 3.5 SOA Maturity Level 5, Optimized Business Services SOA, adds automatic response to the measure-
SOA MATURITY ments and displays of Level 4. In this way, the SOA information system becomes the “enterprise
LEVEL 5 — nervous system” and takes action according to events occurring at the business level according to
OPTIMIZED rules optimizing business goals (see Table 1 and Table 2).
BUSINESS
SERVICES Figure 10 shows the configure, order and manufacture process enhanced to provide dynamic pricing
according to the status of materials and in-process work in the manufacturing plant. For example,
if parts for a particular version of an item are in short supply, pricing can be created to encourage
purchasers to order an item using alternative parts. This example is inspired by the success of Dell
Corporation’s use of dynamic pricing in which a shortage of a particular capacity disk drive,
for example, causes the dynamic creation of a special offer to encourage buyers to configure and
purchase a computer with a larger drive.14,15 Using SOA components allows such an approach to be
more easily implemented and evolved than through the construction of proprietary systems. With
realization of Level 5 Maturity, an organization should see true competitive advantage by leveraging
in real time the flow of information within their enterprise SOA to increase revenues, reduce costs
and respond to unanticipated events in an automated fashion.

Figure 10 — Example Application for SOA Maturity Level 5: Business Optimization

RFID Event
Stream Plant RFID
Processing Materials and
Pricing Fulfillment
Engine In-Process
Service Service
Repository RULES Tracking
Event Service
DB

Services Services Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface Interface Interface

Meaningful
Events All Events
Enterprise Orders Enterprise
Service Bus Dynamic Prices Service Bus

Services Services Services

Interface Interface Interface

Business CUSTOMER
Runtime Configure
Process
Governance and Order INTERNET
Visibility
Service Service
(BPV) Service
CUSTOMER

INTRANET
MANAGER

14
Friedman, Thomas L., The World is Flat, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
15
McWilliams, Gary, “Lean Machine: How Dell Fine-Tunes Its PC Pricing to Gain Edge in a Slow Market”,
The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2001.

20 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The SOA Maturity Model provides a framework supporting both the vision and the assessment > 4.0 CONCLUSION
of increasing levels of business benefits from the adoption of SOA. The levels and key benefits
are as follows:

BENEFITS

Optimized Optimization
Business
Services

Measured Business
Services Transformation

Business Collaborative
Services Services Responsiveness

Architected Services Cost Effectiveness

Initial Services
Functionality

Key to the success of SOA introduction and subsequent success is an evolving partnership between the
technology and business organizations. This partnership is predicated on the ability for the technology
organization to support the business in both responding to competition and in rapidly implementing new
business models such as new distribution channels, new information services products and new pricing
models—all with continuously improving metrics such as profitability and customer satisfaction.

The goal of SOA is to allow this business agility in a way different and better than previous tech-
nologies—different due to the capitalization on Web standards, due to the inherent flexibility of
SOA design, due to the inclusion of legacy systems, and due to the availability of off-the-shelf SOA
infrastructure and services. Ultimately, a company’s success in achieving an increasing level of
maturity will depend on the methodology and rigor that is either created within the enterprise or
fast-tracked by engaging a systems integrator.

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 21

> APPENDIX: SONIC SOFTWARE
KEY CONTRIBUTORS
Sonic Software provides a full range of products to help organizations move through the Maturity
Model and incrementally adopt SOA. Sonic’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a core component for an
intelligent, distributed, and scalable SOA communications infrastructure. Sonic Orchestration Server
extends the intelligent routing capabilities of the Sonic ESB to enable the modeling, execution, and
management of complex, stateful business processes across the extended enterprise. Sonic XML
Server provides high-speed XML processing, storage, and query services for near real-time manage-
ment of Sonic ESB in-flight XML messages.

REALIZING SOA MATURITY WITH SONIC

The following chart outlines how the Sonic products relate to each level of the Maturity Model:

Level 5: Optimized Business Services Business Optimization/Event Stream Processing through Progress®
& Level 4: Measured Business Services ESP™ Event Manager™, Progress® Apama® Algorithmic Trading Platform,
and Progress® RFID

Level 3: Business Service and Business Process Management through Sonic ESB Processes (Itineraries)
Collaborative Services and Sonic Orchestration Server™ for sophisticated central process state
management.

Level 2: Architected Services Foundation SOA functionality through SonicMQ®, Sonic ESB®, Sonic
& Level 1: Initial Services XML Server™, Sonic Database Service™, and Sonic Workbench™

ABOUT SONIC SOFTWARE:

Sonic Software is the inventor and leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB), a new
communication and integration infrastructure that supports the enterprise requirements of a serv-
ice-oriented architecture (SOA). Sonic’s technology delivers the scalability, security, continuous
availability and management capabilities necessary to connect, integrate and control distributed,
mission critical business processes. Over 1,000 customers use Sonic products to achieve broad-
scale interoperability of IT systems and the flexibility to adapt these systems to ever-changing
business needs.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

www.sonicsoftware.com Jonathan Bachman

Phone: 781-999-7000 Email: jbachman@sonicsoftware.com
Email: eval@sonicsoftware.com

22 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

ACTIONAL
Actional provides the runtime governance that is critical for realizing the return on investment from
distributed, heterogeneous service-oriented systems. It can be used across the maturity levels with
increasing functionality—from Initial Services through Optimized Business Services. Actional pro-
vides performance monitoring for Initial Services, ensures compliance with service level agreements
and handles exceptions for Business Services, and monitors business activity for Measured Business
Services. Through all levels of the Maturity Model, Actional delivers automatic dependency tracking
to reduce system complexity and help organizations understand the impact of system changes.

REALIZING SOA MATURITY WITH ACTIONAL

The following chart outlines Actional capabilities at each level of the Maturity Model:

Level 5: Optimized Business Services Business Process Visibility (BPV) provides the monitoring and control
& Level 4: Measured Business Services mechanism to apply service and security policies to all steps within a
business process across heterogeneous SOA infrastructure elements.

Level 3a: Business Services Service level management, exception management and endpoint security.
& Level 3b: Collaborative Services Automatic discovery of services and dependency mapping and tracking.

Level 2: Architected Services Basic performance monitoring and fault detection and notification.
& Level 1: Initial Services

ABOUT ACTIONAL:

Actional provides enterprise-class SOA management and runtime governance solutions to address
the critical challenges of securing, governing and managing SOA environments. Leveraging leading
technology and services, customers achieve the end-to-end transaction visibility required for perform-
ance, web services management and SLA adherence. Actional’s proven solutions are designed for
each stage of migration from Web services pilots to production SOA.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

www.Actional.com
Phone: 1 781 999 7000
Email: info@Actional.com.

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 23

 PROGRESS OPENEDGE
Progress OpenEdge provides a flexible, reliable, and integrated platform for developing composite
applications and their component services. At the core of this platform is Progress’ Advanced
Business Language, a 4GL that includes Object-oriented, procedural and data constructs in one
easy to learn language. This language is married to the OpenEdge RDBMS, making the codifica-
tion of data-intensive business logic very intuitive. This business logic can easily be manifested as
web services and can readily consume web services to create composite applications.

OpenEdge also includes an array of tools that enhance productivity by abstracting away the
complexity of developing on today’s operating systems and deployment platforms. For example,
OpenEdge Architect is an Eclipse-based development environment that simplifies development
through enhanced automation.

REALIZING SOA MATURITY WITH OPENEDGE

The following chart outlines OpenEdge capabilities in the Maturity Model:

Level 3a: Business Services OpenEdge OpenClient to reuse services in a variety of user interface
paradigms (think-client, thin-client, character-based)

Level 2: Architected Services OpenEdge Architect (an Eclipse-based IDE), RDBMS and Application
& Level 1: Initial Services Server to create business logic and expose it as Web services.

ABOUT OPENEDGE:

The Progress® OpenEdge® product line is a comprehensive platform for the rapid development and
deployment of business applications that are standards-based and service-oriented. OpenEdge
can be deployed and managed over a wide range of computer platforms and across the Internet.
OpenEdge provides a unified environment comprising development tools, application servers,
application management tools, an embedded database, and the capability to easily connect and
integrate with other applications and data sources.

Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS) is a US $405M million global software industry leader.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

www.progress.com
Tel: +1-781-280-4000
Toll Free: 1-800-477-6473

24 A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL © 2006. All Rights Reserved.

DATADIRECT TECHNOLOGIES (PREVIOUSLY NEON SYSTEMS)
DataDirect Shadow RTE product is a mainframe integration service which runs natively on the main-
frame. It provides the foundation for standards-based bidirectional communications with mainframe
applications. It supports Web services, real-time events, SQL access, and transactional, as well as
providing auto generation of Web applications from mainframe screen-oriented systems.

REALIZING SOA MATURITY WITH DATADIRECT TECHNOLOGIES

Datadirect’s Shadow RTE maps to the SOA Maturity Model as follows:

Level 4: Measured Business Services Shadow RTE(Shadow z/Events)

Level 3: Business Services Shadow RTE (Shadow z/Services, Shadow z/Services WsC,
Level 2: Architected Services Shadow Studio)
& Level 1: Initial Services

ABOUT DATADIRECT (NEON) TECHNOLOGIES

The acquisition of NEON Systems by DataDirect creates a leader in data connectivity and main-
frame integration. NEON’s Shadow RTE provides the industry’s only single, unified platform for
integrating mainframe data, Web services and real-time events. DataDirect Technologies is the soft-
ware industry's only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world’s most critical
business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging
standards. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation
(Nasdaq: PRGS—News). For more information, visit www.datadirect.com.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

www.shadowrte.com Hugh Raiford

Phone: 770-967-8884 Email: hugh.raiford@neonsys.com

© 2006. All Rights Reserved. A NEW SOA MATURITY MODEL 25

Copyright © 2006, Sonic Software Corporation. All rights reserved.

The New SOA Maturity Model is based on the New SOA Maturity Model © 2005 by Sonic Software Corporation,
AmberPoint Inc., BearingPoint, Inc., Systinet Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks and service marks contained
herein are the property of their respective owners.