The search for new and innovative ways to connect and streamline IT operations persists as customer demands and expectations increase and become more vocal. One key success factor, says experts, is to realize a unified SOA and API strategy.
According to Gartner, leveraging SOA as the foundation for enterprise APIs is becoming standard practice. So much so that the market for this convergence, called application services governance, was valued at around $474 million in 2012 and Gartner believes that by 2016, both SOA and API solution markets will merge into one.
“All companies will benefit from a fully unified API and SOA presence because the need to organize and share enterprise data across many digital channels and user communities is universal in today’s highly connected, mobile world,” says Simon Barere, Director of Technology at SOA Software (www.soa.com). “Few companies can afford to deny their customers a rich and broad range of digital interactions and experiences into the future. And few IT leaders can afford to report to their business management that lack of new channels of customer interaction is due to a lack of the IT tools and platforms needed to deliver this. Both sets of stakeholders depend on enterprise IT’s ability to safely and cost effectively manage and distribute the apps and data needed to enable the new digital channels that will drive the customer and the business forward.”
SOA Software is a leader in API management and SOA governance. Together with IBM WebSphere DataPower, SOA Software offers customers a unified solution for SOA and API management that follows the optimal model of convergence on the IBM platform and provides key features such as lifecycle management, runtime management, community management, and IBM WebSphere DataPower automation.
Customers within information-rich sectors such as financial services, media, and the public sector, are especially vocal of their need for new and differentiating digital channels, including mobile, Barere explains.
According to Barere, customers are realizing that APIs offer the promise of new digital and marketing channels. “They see their customers asking for more and more visibility and transparency in their business interactions, and they are realizing that APIs are a key IT enabler to satisfy these requests,” he says. “This greatly raises the strategic importance of realizing an IBM enterprise environment that is easy to manage and share, because APIs depend on these environments to offer this visibility and transparency.”
In order to ensure the maximum benefits of a unified SOA and API solution, Barere says business leaders need to ensure that their API program is developed in a manner that intersects with and converges with their existing SOA foundation. This means that the API program will utilize the same service lifecycle processes, the same enterprise integration capabilities, and the same operational model for deploying and running APIs.
For many IBM customers, this operational model is based on their existing IBM WebSphere DataPower infrastructure, an infrastructure that they can then partner with SOA Software’s management solution to extend for both API and SOA scenarios. Many of the integration and operational tasks that IBM WebSphere DataPower is already helping with today can then be transparently applied to the customer’s API program.
Once they realize this solution, clients can ensure that the process of developing, running, and sharing a new API will feel the same to an API developer as the process for coming out with a new internal SOA service. The API developer will utilize new consumption capabilities, but the foundational technology, tools, and capabilities should not have to change or require reimplementation.
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These companies will especially benefit from a unified API and SOA solution; however, the need for a unified solution is universal, says Barere. He explains that while different organizations will have different requirements for their API and SOA solution, common across all enterprises is the need for a unified solution to avoid uphill battles in their IT environments. Common challenges of solutions that are not unified include the need for ad-hoc integration between SOA and API platforms, lack of uniformity of features across multiple solutions, lack of standardization, multiple overlapping runtime operational models, and confusion over IT ownership and roles.
“All of these challenges increase risk for the customer and increase capital and operational costs,” he says.
The relationship between SOA and API: The sum is greater than its parts
SOA governance and API management have differences and similarities that are important to recognize as you plan your strategy and as these technologies converge.
APIs make complex enterprise environments more transparent and usable to external consumers by offering tools, technologies, and processes that promote consumption, says Barere. APIs not only allow enterprises to leverage wide ranging standards such as HTTP and JSON, but also promote the consumption of enterprise data to build communities of mobile app and API developers.
SOA technology helps organizations streamline their internal, back-end IBM systems. “By representing a large, complex IBM environment as a set of easily managed SOA services with clear service lifecycles, clear data interfaces and data models, clear organizational ownership, clear user access control, and clear runtime and operational models, IBM customers gain an agile, cost effective, scalable approach to running their IT environment,” says Barere.
In order to ensure the maximum benefits of a unified SOA and API solution, business leaders need to ensure that their API program is developed in a manner that intersects with and converges with their existing SOA foundation.
Simon Barere, Director of Technology at SOA Software
When you bring API and SOA solutions together, the greatest gain is realized, he explains, because SOA infrastructures deliver the enterprise data needed to make APIs interesting, relevant, and rich, while APIs then make that data easy to find, consume, and share. These solutions rely on each other—APIs on the vast amount of data managed by the mature SOA lifecycle processes, and SOA on API technology to meet the new consumption demands of mobile, cloud, analytics, and performance management. This unified environment becomes easy to manage and run, and is made easily available to the key consumption stakeholders that can put the data to good use.
Although API and SOA have different aims—consumption of enterprise data versus the production of services that expose enterprise data, respectively—they fundamentally address the same problem. As mobile, cloud, and web channels demand the externalization and mass consumption of an enterprise’s internal infrastructure, a unified solution becomes necessary due to the natural intersection between these two sets of internal and external needs, explains Barere.
In other words, excluding APIs from SOA maturation can lead to missed business opportunities that APIs would otherwise capitalize on. Conversely, moving forward with an API program independent of SOA causes challenges with enterprise integration and service lifecycle management, as well as an IT overlap in areas such as operational runtime, process, and standardization.
“Similar to SOA programs, API programs benefit from well-defined data interfaces, standardization of operational processes, and automation of the API service lifecycle,” says Barere. “But without a strong foundation of SOA governance fundamentals, these capabilities and others will be missing from the customer’s API program.”
For more information about SOA Software, visit www.soa.com.