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There is no widely agreed upon definition of service-oriented architecture other than its literal translation that it is an architecture that relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle. Service-orientation describes an architecture that uses loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. Resources on a network in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation. These concepts can be applied to business, software and other types of producer/consumer systems. SDA Asia spoke to Juniper’s Regional Enterprise Solutions Manager Abby Tang to find out more about SOA.

SDA Asia: Can you tell us about Juniper' role in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Why do you think applications are more important than infrastructure today and how will SOA help in the resurgence of the IT industry?

Abby Tang (AT): Juniper Networks Chairman and CEO Scott Kriens heralded Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as "the next big thing" to drive IT spending. Juniper is very much a networking company. The reason why we said that is because every one is so much into simplicity these days. The existing application is being used as client and server and most of the time it will create problems when there is client and server through the network instead of LAN. So by saying that SOA is going to be the next big thing for IT is because today every company is talking about globalisation, thus they don’t always deploy clients as a measure to cut costs, because deploying clients can be costly for IT administration purposes and secondly it can be very buggy. You don’t want to be trouble-shooting every other second. So SOA will assist all the applications to roll out in a simple way so that it can potentially help IT administrators to understand better the business requirement as well as better support on the networking side.

Kriens cited research from The Yankee Group that projects SOA-related spending to hit USD 11 billion by 2010. For customers, SOA enables IT—including infrastructure, applications and security—to support the business agenda and processes, which can make it a strategic, competitive advantage, he said. Open standards also are a critical piece of the SOA puzzle and will enable customers to leverage investments they've already made, he added.

When we talk about networking people always think we are layer 2 of layer 3 network. As we all know networking has seven layers and application fits in the seventh layer. Whereas the networking hardware and routing will be on the second and first. So as you can see a lot of people, when talking about SOA they think that the stack is related to the network, but the stack actually is built from the ground up. So Juniper does not take care of layer two and three but also layer seven—the networking layer as well. Thus Juniper takes care of all layers, many people are of the opinion that Juniper does not touch application, but as a matter of fact the company does.

SDA: Do you think applications are more important than networking today?

AT: It is a very tricky question as both of them go hand in hand and supplement each other. They cease to exist on their own. Imagine application without infrastructure, it would be like being able to access one’s e-mail per hour, which is not at all feasible. And imagine working without application, then what is the purpose of networks. Thus they go hand in hand to be effective.

SDA: Tell us about Juniper’s own SOA strategy. How do you make use of SOA and where all do you use that?

AT: For Juniper it will be the whole complete solution on networking support. This ensures the quality of services, and how the priority of the application should be manageable. The security implementation is a key point of SOA.

SDA: Deeper connection between business managers and IT – Business Process Management (BPM) and SOA create unified language for communicating and executing business requirements. Can you explain this to us more in detail?

AT: To continue with the same strain, that application and networking go hand in hand, but before the application managers hardly ever talked to the networking managers because they were completely two different groups of people. On the other hand, with SOA implementation that will allow them a channel to be able to talk to each other. Now application is relies heavily on networking even more than before. Now not only do the application managers talk to the networking managers but also business people who drive application demand will have to communicate very closely with both of the groups from IT. And that’s why we are saying that SOA will link everyone in the business. This also provides networking managers a better understanding of business needs as they are talking closely with the business managers and that would make the business even more efficient than before because communication is now bridged by SOA.

SOA creates a unified language for communication because SOA enables communication via a common language. Just like all the languages would communicate through GCPIP, now we are using languages like HTML, SOAP or all the HTML 2.0 application. Thus instead of looking at ten different systems, say for example—the mainframe system and the networking system, which are completely separated from each other. Now we use a common language so that we can all talk together, like using HTML, I can access not only the mainframes, but also access Oracle database system and the like.

SDA: Projections by Gartner say that SOA will provide the basis of 80% of new software development projects across the industry by 2008. The Yankee Group estimates that SOA applications will be an USD11 billion business by 2011. Do you believe that is an indication that SOA will be the catalyst needed to send the IT industry back upward again, following its post-Internet-boom crash?

AT: I surely believe so and so does our CEO Scott Kriens. They will be a lot of going on to derive that common language, so once we have the infrastructure ready then the future development will be a lot easier. There is a lot of hard work that needs to be done for 2008 and that is why we see a lot of news developments in what we call next generation networking.

SDA: Security can be a big issue in SOA governance. Can you tell us how?

AT: Security is the common topic spoken about when talking about compliance. So the question is how does security come in place with all this compliance. Now, Juniper provides solutions that provide information on aspects such as how to track who gets to go into the network, who gets to access what, what time and what did they access and also what kind of document they are trying to retrieve.

Thus security is a major portion and also reporting is a major portion of compliance and both of these requirements can be met by Juniper solutions.

SDA: How are Juniper’s solutions different from peer products available in the market today?

AT: The major difference will be open standard. A lot of access control and even networking solutions that we are seeing in the market are very proprietary. Whereas as our approach, almost to very product be it Unified Access Control (UAC) as well as routing as well as SSL VPN, even firewall have an open standard that we meet. So any kind of security consulting or auditing firms for risk assessment want to write something customise something to work with Juniper solution they can, whereas for other vendors it is so proprietary, that there is no such open standard. We have something called Application-Programming Interface (API), which is the link between any of our products and our customer’s specification or requirement.

Even if it is not a specific customer, say if Symantec wants to use our solution and do integration with that, they can easily do it with an API

SDA: Some SOA standards are still immature, leading to confusion and vendor-driven proprietary creep?

AT: There are a lot of vendors that say they support SOA, but customers really need to understand what they mean when they say a vendor supports SOA. Does it mean that they are creating proprietary products or protocol when they are deploying the customers with SOA? The whole purpose of SOA is open standard and one common language to communicate to all applications. So if a vendor is saying that they support SOA when it’s just proprietary protocol that’s not true SOA. Thus SOA has too many standards because many different vendors are saying many different things, so open standard will be the key element when you look at SOA deployment.

SDA: SOA can give you a more direct and dynamic ability to model business process and map those processes to the underlying IT assets that support them. Can you explain this?

AT: The whole thing about SOA is the openness and also the flexibility of future deployments. And when we say that it can give you a larger and dynamic ability, it’s basically talking about the business flexibility and the business performance that the model can offer to the existing as well as the future business. That will address the IT flexibility of deploying the new services as well as expanding the network or the number of people who will be accessing any particular application.

SDA: Can you elaborate on the benefits of SOA? What are the important considerations when deploying SOA?

AT: The benefits of SOA, firstly is the flexibility that it offers. At the same time people need to be very careful regarding the security. Similar example would be Voice over IP (VoIP), because it helps to cut costs, it also cuts cost in the long-term. But if people are deploying VoIP without any security consideration, in the long run, it can be very dangerous; it can turn out to be a threat to the company because security and convenience always go in different directions. In SOA the idea is to provide convenience, flexibility, but at the same time safety is the key element that people need to be careful of when they are deploying SOA. The benefit is that SOA does work and it is flexible and it does help to increase the performance of business assets. It helps differentiate people who adopt SOA earlier than later and as I mentioned earlier it will cut costs in the long term. And because of its flexibility it allows the deployment of new services to customers, in the long run, it will increment revenue, at the same time the networking support and the security support will have to be one of the key elements for SOA deployment.

SDA: Can you walk us through the need for SOA governance? Why is it imperative in today’s day and age?

AT: Today, its pretty loose right now but as the protocol and the common language is being derived, there will be more and more solid deployment for SOA, but the good news is a lot of the major companies have successfully deployed SOA. One example is the insurance company called AXA—they have created a very successful SOA deployment.

SOA governance refers to the industry's efforts to establish practices and tools for managing this mesh and enforcing consistent security, performance and other policies across the service life cycle. SOA governance tools let organisations continuously model, map, monitor and take control of their distributed environments. Effective governance ensures that the enterprise SOA complies with all applicable regulatory, competitive, operational and other baseline requirements.

SDA: Can you tell us about the roadmap Juniper has for the next year?

AT: Juniper has also maintained open standards, so the road map of the SOA deployment will be that we continue to keep our open standards commitment. And also if you have heard about Trusted Computing Group (TCG)—a larger computing group that also disuses SOA. One of the representatives of Juniper is the chairman of TCG. So we look at how other computing groups are derived at.