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Future Belongs to SOA

Ed McKinley May 2007

Insurance company IT people began kicking around the phrase "service-oriented architecture" at least four or five years ago. For short, some call it by the two-syllable name "soa," while others prefer to spell out the letters "S-O-A."

However it's pronounced, SOA refers to a way of thinking nearly as old as computing itself and bound to remain relevant far into the future. It's all about creating services that save time and money because applications developers can re-use them-often on mainframes.

As with so many IT concepts, the term SOA has many meanings and is often defined to fit the needs of a product someone is trying to sell, says Stephen Korow, vice president of technology at Decision Research Corp., a Honolulu-based software vendor.

Sometimes definitions vary among the business units of a single company, says Archie Roboostoff, director of product management at NetManage Inc., a Cupertino, Calif.-based software supplier.

A CTO at a carrier that will remain unnamed here calls SOA "formalized common sense," according to Mark Gorman, associate director in the Insurance practice at TowerGroup, a Needham, Mass.-based research company.

That CTO describes SOA as a natural outgrowth of activities under way for decades, including object-oriented software development, componentized functions and disaggregation, says Gorman. "Those issues have merged and evolved to the point we've put a name on it," he says. "We've called it SOA."

For the insurance industry SOA means more than services, Gorman says. People with a SOA mindset value the mainframe computer and the intellectual property built up on mainframes over the years as a valuable asset, a critical component of services-oriented architecture and a vital part of the technology stack.

Still, some of the code on older mainframes needs fixing, cautions Chuck Johnston, product marketing senior director for Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle Corp. "Be careful you don't paint over rotten wood," he says.

And while useful, SOA can't banish every woe. Carriers should introduce SOA gradually, using it in projects where it makes sense and avoiding it in projects where it serves no purpose, advises Hans Brunner, GBS solutions manager for Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Global Business Services. In the wrong place, SOA consumes money needlessly and can slow some processes, he says.

How much money? "If you look at the cost to get existing solutions to interoperate, it's very expensive," says John Burke, vice president for insurance at Waldorf, Germany-based SAP. "An adapter on a point-to-point could be anywhere from $10,000 to a million dollars."

What's more, keeping SOA in mind when it's not in use requires an awfully good memory, so New York-based Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. has found a way to institutionalize the mind set, says Stephen Kessler, MetLife vice president of application development.

The SOA consciousness for his part of the MetLife IT universe resides in a team of about a dozen IT people that includes service developers, analysts and project managers. The team specializes in building services and making technologies talk to each other, as Kessler puts it.

Most developers do that kind of work only once a year or so. Because the SOA team does it every day, they're quick and efficient at mixing and matching pieces of the services already in the toolbox, Kessler says. They know what's there and how to use it. "They don't start with a blank piece of paper" when they start a project, he says of the team.

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