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- Monetizing Your SOA.
Figuring out ways to meter usage, institute chargebacks, and even charging outright fees to external trading partners and customers allows the necessary negative feedback to discourage irresponsible or profligate use of services. This works well on the web and the most successful APIs online are metered in some way.
- Enable users as service consumers.
This also cuts across some of the items above, but is best exemplified by the software mashup phenomenon, which describes a method of quickly combining two or more sources of content into a new high-value application. Enable it and encourage it; it's just another way to make your SOA invaluable to the business and generally popular as well.
- Virtualization, fast scaling, and on-demand architectures.
All of the things driving down the economics of software hosting will allow your SOA to scale up to the web. Just like operations has become a core competency of SaaS and Web 2.0 sites, so too is it in the highly spiky usage model of on-demand services where a successful network effect can cripple your availability and response times.
- Offering an SOA as visual services via widgets.
Widgets also have access to back-end infrastructure (i.e. an SOA) and are snippets of Javascript or Flash badges that allow little bits of data-driven functionality such as stock tickers, corporate news, and other information to reside in any webpage and be fed by back-end services. This is another effective way to put a "face" on an SOA and get it used in many different completely unexpected ways.
- Considering JSON as a service option.
XML is definitely not very fast, particularly if there is lots of numeric information in the network payload. JSON, the Javascript Object Notation, has risen through the ranks quickly in the last year as a highly compact way to send information on the wire to a web application.
- Encouraging and discovering emergent solutions.
I've come to describe this tight process of co-evolution via realtime feedback, harnessing user contributions, and becoming a platform that others actually build upon something known as Product Development 2.0. Even if your corporate SOA doesn't work this way today, it can be made to fairly easily with online metrics and monitoring, though like many SOA issues, governance and control soon become significant issues.
- Leveraging the Global SOA.
It simply no longer makes sense to have an SOA that does not have access to the Global SOA on the web where hundreds of high-value APIs are available and millions of lesser ones in the form of RSS and ATOM. The challenges around the governance issues of figuring out how to bring in external services safely and provisioning them for use as part of your enterprise SOA.
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 Dion Hinchcliffe is founder and chief technology officer of Hinchcliffe & Company, based in Alexandria, Virginia. |
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