INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

SOA: The Better Way to Leverage Your Investments

September 2007

"The message is clear," writes Forrester analyst Randy Heffner. "It is time to dispense with excuses and begin your move to SOA." According to Forrester, nearly 70 percent of SOA users say they will increase their use of SOA, and 46 percent of large enterprise users of SOA use it for strategic business transformation.¹

It's easy to understand the appeal of a services-oriented architecture. Simply put, an SOA provides agility to the business by separating business processes from their underlying technology infrastructure to provide loosely coupled business services. IT can then tackle managing technology by either creating and re-using services or by connecting them to others via Web Services protocols to form entirely new composite applications.

"The technologies and standards that are used in SOA, and which have been developed over the last few years, hold out a real possibility of delivering on the promise of greater simplicity," writes Philip Howard of Bloor Research.²

An SOA liberates IT from working with a vendor's proprietary code and defined implementation environment. And no longer does the application define the business process. Instead, writes CIO Executive Editor Christopher Koch, enterprise applications become just a piece of the service, yet another component of a larger business process such as an insurance claims process that links a jumble of functions and data inside ERP, CRM and old mainframe legacy systems.³

Align business intelligence with business requirements, increase agility

Business intelligence is ideal as one of the early services deployed in SOA. With BI as a service, information from existing enterprise applications can be woven into business processes to deliver a consistent view of information to drive better business performance.

This is important, because changes in customer demand, market dynamics, and the competitive landscape all have repercussions for IT. Each new report, analysis, or initiative means data must be combined in new ways. And most enterprise applications and business intelligence applications just weren't built to provide this kind of agility.

Existing applications create information silos

Not that companies will be abandoning their million-dollar enterprise applications. these applications have incrased efficiencies in core processes and capture critical transactional data. The task now is for IT to leverage this information to gain an enterprise view across all these systems into everyday business processes without resorting to additional large-scale and siloed applications.

The need for business intelligence

IT can choose from two solutions: deploy a bigger proprietary system that does more—such as a database that offers pre-built reports. Or deploy BI as a service that connects to all enterprise applications and integrate the data into a complete view. This approach allows for a broader view across existing investments independent of transactional data store.

Built on SOA, Cognos 8 BI can leverage existing investments

Cognos 8 BI is built on the proven SOA of Cognos ReportNet™. It's designed to leverage existing complex, mixed application environments including platforms, databases, OLAP and relational data sources, Web servers, and security providers to provide platform-independence and adapabability.

This leverage of existing investments helps IT maximize return on current investments, and reduces rather than increases complexity. And because Cognos 8 BI is platform-independent, it can easily accomodate future changes in infrastructure. For BI users who need access to comprehensive, reliable business information, this SOA architecture enables Cognos 8 to bring a consistent view of the information to the table.

"The new services-oriented architecture across the complete Cognos BI portfolio greatly increases manageability for large-scale enterprise deployments like ours," says John Hasenzahl, Director of Knowledge Services and Data Management at logistics and transport provider Schneider National.⁴

A partnership with IBM

To extend the reach of Cognos 8 BI, Cognos recently announced a new global strategic alliance with IBM to develop industry-based solutions built on SOA. "Both companies share a vision for providing cost effective, integrated business solutions for enterprise companies. With this alliance, our organizations will be more tightly aligned and in an optimal position to help our customers succeed with their BI and performance management initiatives," says Cognos President and CEO Rob Ashe.⁵

"The Cognos open, distributed architecture works seamlessly on our existing IBM technology infrastructure and as a result, we can ensure residents and employees find consistent and helpful information to help keep the city running smoothly and more efficiently," says Chris Framel, applications group manager at the City of Albuquerque.⁶

Summary

Proprietary systems are gradually being replaced by open, scalable architectures like SOA. Instead of introducing just another siloed application, SOA leverages existing IT assets to provide greater overall value. In the case of BI, our SOA architecture of Cognos 8 enables IT to take the next step in better business performance.