In Touch With Retailing

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): The Core of Next-Generation Store Software

By Keith McNamara, Senior Vice President, Software Operations, Fujitsu Transaction Solutions Inc.

Greater flexibility. Tighter collaboration. Shorter cycle times. Better use of existing intellectual capital. Every retailer knows how any of these benefits would improve the power and effectiveness of a store’s IT programs and systems. What many might not know, however, is that all of these operational benefits can be delivered through solutions that leverage a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Today.

The move toward broad SOA adoption is continuing to gain momentum in retail technology circles. According to a recent study from the Retail Systems Alert Group, 37 percent of respondents are actively developing a business case for moving applications to SOA support, and 11 percent are already fully committed to an enterprise-wide SOA implementation.

The rapid emergence of SOA isn’t just happening among retailers. In fact, as the Retail Systems Alert Group study notes, "the growing momentum surrounding the adoption of SOA across all business segments is one of the most significant technology-driven initiatives since the emergence of the Internet."¹

With such a powerful new technology trend – and major paradigm shift – in the market, it’s important for retailers not only to understand the benefits an SOA-enabled environment will offer, but also the potential roadblocks and challenges that can arise from poorly executed endeavors. Integrating new store systems with existing applications and devices has always been hard, and using a new service-oriented architecture is itself neither trivial nor easy. But with the overarching benefits SOA offers retailers, the rewards are more than worth the effort.

SERVICES. OPPORTUNITIES. ADVANTAGES.

On the most fundamental level, a service-oriented architecture can be described as a collection of disparate IT services that are able to communicate with each other in a data network. Rather than requiring a single code base to perform their specific tasks, individual applications and components provide distinct business logic or workflow "services" that essentially can stand alone.

With SOA, one application service can expect another application service to perform a specific task, in much the same way as distinct tasks are handled on an automotive assembly line, where each station on the line performs a single, pre-determined task. This "loosely coupled" approach enables the IT system to change, update and add functionality within one component without affecting another component or application within the system, given there is no change in the system’s existing business rules.

When thinking of SOA, one must understand these four basic components:

• A "service bus" sends messages between components via a standard, well-managed and well-documented methodology;
• A work flow "broker" or "traffic cop" manages the application flow of what comes next in an “if-then” scenario;
• Business rules, such as sales promotions, customer loyalty data, price changes, daily sales and other retail-centric initiatives that influence interconnected processes;
• User interfaces to manage and control POS and other store technology applications, as well as a multitude of interconnected store hardware devices.

The main advantage – and breakthrough – this architecture offers is its ability to make, for the first time, pervasive network integration a major, real-world benefit in the retailing environment. With SOA, it’s now possible to quickly integrate historically disparate IT resources with each other, as well as bring tighter linkage between independent data applications that have operated as silos in the past.

Faster application changes and new technology capabilities provided by SOA components not only streamline IT operations, but help deliver on the most important measurements of all in retail – the bottom line.

MAKING A POINT OF SUCCESS

Service-Oriented Architecture gives retailers the ability to adhere to and build upon industry standards without artificially jettisoning their legacy systems and current IT investments. From a time and cost perspective, such a speed advantage is clearly an important benefit, but SOA early adopters have had to fight hard to ensure that coding-related concerns don’t move ahead of application design considerations.

Answering the "how it’s built" question correctly is considerably more critical.

Development time is merely one factor in the holistic picture of how quickly an application gets deployed into stores. Retailers who focus on the larger, business process-related concerns are already competitively ahead in launching savvy, store-centric solutions and gaining a 30-40 percent reduction in total project time through SOA.

The success of these SOA-savvy retailers is enabled by addressing some of the least discussed – but most important – design and implementation factors, such as testing, bug fixing and issue resolution. SOA’s design patterns allow the IT team to encapsulate bugs, issues and last minute changes into the "unique service" each provides, thereby speeding turnaround time and resolving issues with minimal impact on the network.

SOA’s ability to speed the change management process and allow new code to deploy into stores is further enhanced by dividing applications into their "service component" parts. Many applications are now being developed with an SOA message bus being built within the application framework, offering the ability to send and receive data within a transaction to and from any source within a retailer’s enterprise. Such an approach helps to further reduce integration efforts, while providing added flexibility.

As noted by Dennis Gaughan of AMR Research, "SOA is not a single product: it is an architectural approach designed to support maximum flexibility and reuse of existing assets."² This flexibility allows retailers to use many of the functions they already have in place (regardless of their age or implementation style), as well as to add other functions without concern.

But from a broader, bottom-line perspective industry wide, the emergence of SOA is being driven by the retailer’s “need for speed” and harmonious interoperability, along with operational mandates for continually integrating legacy applications and devices with new software and hardware.

On all fronts, SOA environments are moving to the foreground of many leading retailers’ strategic thinking in general and IT development planning in particular. Are you ready to move to the forefront as well?