Will service-oriented architecture (SOA) replace ERP?


No. Every company needs a core transactional system that records the information from its most important business processes. But companies are realizing that ERP is shifting from being the sum total of their software architecture strategy to being a component of a larger strategy based on expressing technology as specific business services that business people can easily understand—such as “customer record” or “get credit rating,” for example—rather than arcane software applications like ERP.

The services strategy entails building an integration layer that is separate and distinct from any of the software applications—including ERP—in a company’s portfolio. The foundational piece—known as the messaging infrastructure—is like a good executive assistant—translating, routing and monitoring information from different systems without these systems needing to connect directly. Adding, changing or removing a system becomes a matter of modifying a single link, rather than ripping apart connections to all the different systems it may need to communicate with.

But while the messaging infrastructure makes connecting systems easier, it doesn’t free business processes from their mainframe prisons, or eliminate redundancies in applications, or provide any impetus to create a useful architecture. Indeed, a good messaging infrastructure can perpetuate the chaos by making it easier to deal with.

Messaging has long lacked a higher purpose, a strategy. Service objects (or just plain “services”) are that strategy, and it is the second core piece of the integration layer. This is an old concept, based on object-oriented programming from the ‘80s. Services extract pieces of data and business logic from systems and databases around the company and bundle them together into chunks that are expressed in business terms.

At telecom company Verizon, for example, the service called “get CSR” (get customer service record) is a complex jumble of software actions and data and business logic extractions that uses Verizon’s messaging infrastructure to access more than 25 systems in as many as four data centers across the country. Before building the “get CSR” service, Verizon developers wanting to get at that critical lump of data would have to build links to all 25 systems—adding their own links on top of the web of links already hanging off the popular systems.

But with the “get CSR” service sitting in a central repository on Verizon’s intranet, those developers can now build a single link to the carefully crafted interface that wraps around the service using the Web services standard simple object access protocol (SOAP). Those 25 systems immediately line up and march, sending customer information to the new application and saving developers months, even years, of development time each time the service is used.

The most interesting new “feature” being developed by the ERP vendors today is the extent to which they will make their software part of a service SOA using their own homegrown integration software, known as middleware, and Web services so that customers can more easily link ERP with other types of software in the architecture. Each vendor has claimed fealty to the concept and each has its own vision of how to create an integration layer independent of its own software that is capable of linking to any other piece of software in the universe. But view their pronouncements skeptically because if they do it well they will eliminate an important piece of their competitive differentiation: dominance over the software acquisition process of their customers.

When CIOs call themselves a “SAP shop” or an “Oracle shop,” it’s because software from those companies dominates their architecture and new software from those providers works better with their existing code base than does code from other vendors. Vendors who make integration with their software truly universal eliminate the built-in advantage they have with existing customers. Some ways that vendors use their new middleware strategies to keep customers: The middleware is offered only to customers who upgrade to the latest version of ERP, or customers are charged a fee for using the middleware to link with software from another vendor.

Christopher Koch