SOA's ECM Impact Q&A With Sameer Samat, VP Of Engineering And Development, Dicom Group
SOA (service oriented architecture) is a concept that has dominated networking news for more than a year. Now, this framework for building IT networks and Web services is making waves in the ECM industry as well. Select ECM and data capture vendors are beginning to modify their existing solution offerings to be more compatible with an SOA environment. One such vendor is Kofax. We recently spoke with Sameer Samat, VP of engineering and development for Kofax's parent company, Dicom Group, to get his take on the role SOA will play in ECM solution implementations and how Kofax is evolving as a result.
ECM Connection: What does SOA mean to you and why is it generating so much buzz?
Samat: SOA means different things to different people. From our perspective, SOA is an architectural style that supports integrating the enterprise as a set of services that are composed or linked together. The ideas behind SOA (e.g. componentization of software functionality, loose coupling between sets of functionality, and developing a set of standards for being able to link these pieces of functionality together) are not necessarily new ideas. However, businesses are facing new challenges these days and IT departments are just beginning to embrace the SOA concept as a way to deal with those problems. The driving force behind SOA adoption is not so much an IT need as it is a business need.
ECM Connection: What are some of the rising business needs that are making SOA a style that is sought after?
Samat: First and foremost is the need for additional flexibility and agility within the enterprise. Enterprises need to be able to react quickly and effectively to rapid changes to their business environments. The days when a corporation could take two or three years to retool its IT systems in response to a business change are waning. Organizations are going through tremendous merger and acquisition activity these days and this consolidation causes dramatic changes to a business environment that can occur almost overnight. Traumatic events in the world and globalization have also created the need for rapid changes in the way businesses operate. Businesses need to be able to quickly restructure their IT systems in order to address these environmental changes. They need the ability to recompose applications, to create new applications, and to reorder the way applications operate very quickly. This demand is pushing people to SOA.
Another factor pushing people toward SOA is lower total cost of ownership (TCO). If implemented correctly, SOA will allow an organization to reuse specific software components for different technical or departmental applications, reducing the TCO of the overall solution. For example, within an SOA, a data capture component initially built for a claims processing department can easily be leveraged by all other areas of the organization that may need it. Reinventing the wheel is something that businesses want to drive out, and they see SOA as a tool to enable that.
Finally, faster deployment and time to value is another driver for SOA adoption. The reusability that SOA allows also comes into play here. If I have a set of components and I only need to link them together to build an application, I can have something up and running much more quickly than if I'm building those things from scratch or customizing the entire application. The loose-coupling concept SOA is based on means software applications don't need to be hardwired together in order to create an application or integrate applications together. This is allowing businesses to realize the value of their IT initiatives much quicker.
ECM Connection: How quickly do you see organizations actually implementing SOA strategies within their organizations?
Samat: I think it varies. We've seen accelerated SOA adoption in industries where a lot of business changes (i.e. mergers and acquisitions, reorganization of industries due to regulatory factors) are occurring. Some organizations in those areas, such as financial services, have established SOA road maps. In other words, they may have only started implementing SOA in a few select areas, but have a clear vision of how they want to manage the overall initiative. Most of these businesses are starting out with very straightforward and simple tasks and they're letting the business needs drive deployment. They're not tackling everything at once, but identifying the areas of their organization with the greatest need for flexibility and agility and implementing SOA there first because it will add the most value.
ECM Connection: How is SOA affecting the ECM industry in particular?
Samat: As ECM moves toward becoming a mainstream technology, more IT organizations are looking for ways to lower their TCO and simplify system maintenance by consolidating the number of vendors they work with and standardizing their ECM platforms. When you think about ECM in this context, ECM as an infrastructure becomes a realistic possibility for the near future. A number of ECM vendors are already moving into the infrastructure layer of the organization. The challenge these vendors face is taking that ECM infrastructure, with the different services it offers (e.g. document imaging, data capture, records management), and integrating that with the number of different vertical and business unit applications that need to leverage these capabilities. SOA is being viewed as the means in which to do that. A select group of ECM vendors are moving toward providing ECM as a service and allowing users to configure, deploy, and reuse ECM capabilities in multiple different contexts.
From our standpoint, we're looking to pair with our back end ECM partners to offer our products and solutions in a way that mix nicely with an SOA environment. To accomplish this, we must not only shift paradigms and begin thinking about our products as loosely coupled components, we must also create technical product road maps and adopt all the standards and technologies that will enable us to be SOA compliant.
ECM Connection: How does an ECM application need to be configured to be truly compatible with an SOA?
Samat: I don't think there is any one answer right now. However, I think there are some basics to working in an SOA environment. For example, most ECM products as they currently exist contain a set of functionality. To be SOA compliant, those pieces of functionality need to be made available for consumption as discrete elements or discrete components. For Kofax, our product line is geared toward helping end users collect, transform, and deliver data to other business applications. Our products currently deliver on this promise through packaged software suites containing all the pieces of functionality that may be needed to complete a specific application. SOA is about transforming these big slices of functionality into individual components and making them accessible and reusable in multiple applications throughout an enterprise. Certainly, these components can still be used together, but users should have the ability to isolate individual features and functions and inject them into a business workflow as needed. At a technological level, programming standards are allowing this software transformation to occur. These standards are always evolving, but there are a set of basics that encompass Web services and provide the ability to expose individual software capabilities or slices of functionality through a set of interoperability standards and abstract programming language.
ECM Connection: Does all ECM software need to be redesigned to be compatible with SOA?
Samat: Not necessarily. Web services or SOAP (service object access protocol) language can be wrapped around a certain software feature, allowing it to provide certain functions within an SOA. However, by discreetly breaking down the pieces of a software application into valuable and loosely coupled components, the ability for it to be consumed in more ways increases significantly. I think there's value for ECM vendors to focus on breaking down applications into those discreet components so that customers can leverage certain pieces when and where they want to in their business workflows. This approach is driving the software development road map of Kofax and its partners.
ECM Connection: Where are most ECM vendors in the process of making their software SOA compatible?
Samat: I think the ECM industry as a whole is wrestling to determine which discreet pieces of functionality really need to be transformed into individual components. Many ECM vendors (including ourselves) are talking with their customers about those different discrete pieces of functionality and trying to understand what to tackle first. We've seen some vendors take digital rights management and make that a discrete piece of functionality. We've seen others take the core content store for versioning and make that a separate piece of functionality. The market is really helping to determine these decisions. As customers ask for a specific component, some vendors are adding it to their offerings. I think many ECM vendors right now are being a little cautious in their SOA development strategy because they don't want to get too far ahead of what their customers really feel is important for the organization to gain flexibility. We all have our ears to the ground and we're trying to understand how to break those applications down. For some of us it's a software redesign, and for others it is just what I would call refactoring.
ECM Connection: What lasting impact will SOA have on the way ECM solutions are bought, sold, implemented, and maintained?
Samat: If SOA continues to be adopted and continues to leverage ECM as a service, the impact will be profound because it will allow ECM to realize its place as true infrastructure. SOA will likely cause people to change the way they think about ECM — it will become a pervasive enterprise service that is consumed by multiple different business processes, multiple different workflows, multiple different applications, and is as basic to the enterprise as any of the other core services that are offered today, such as e-mail. Kofax's role in this evolution is to support our back end ECM software partners and allow those vendors, our VARs, and our customers to consume our software capabilities in multiple different ways throughout their applications and environments.