WHITEPAPER

Evolution of SOA
How organizations develop agile
service-oriented architecture
(SOA) to rein in IT costs and secure
their competitive advantage

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Table of contents

Service-oriented architecture overview ...................................... 3

Why SOA? Uses and benefits ............................................................. 4

Best practices for selecting a SOA solution ............................... 6

Business objectives .................................................................................... 6
Technical considerations .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Project requirements ................................................................................ 7

“Top-down” SOA ......................................................................................... 8

“Bottom-up” SOA .................................................................................... 10

Case study: FTSE 100 company ....................................................... 11

Mule runtime engine and Anypoint Platform™:

the best way to enable SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Learn more about SOA .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

About MuleSoft ...................................................................................... 15

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Service-oriented architecture overview

Since it first emerged more than a decade ago, service-oriented

architecture (SOA) has been both widely praised as a modern
and agile approach to software development and infrastructure
architecture and dismissed as a colossal waste of time and
money. Missed expectations for many SOA projects led one
analyst in 2009 to declare, “SOA is dead.” Far from being dead,
however, service-oriented architecture is in fact more
relevant than ever.
The mega-trends of SaaS, mobile, and Big Data are converging
to create a massive explosion of endpoints and data. In this
new enterprise era, businesses can be overwhelmed by the
resulting connectivity demands, or they can seize the
opportunity and gain competitive advantage by seamlessly
connecting everything. The smartest enterprises are
transforming fragmentation into strength by connecting today’s
explosion of applications, data, partners, and customers into a
single, high-performing entity.
The strategies for developing this connected enterprise are the
fundamentals of agile SOA. The key challenge: finding a
platform solution that can deliver immediate impact while
providing a foundation for meeting future cloud and
on-premises integration demands. Drawing on lessons from
leading organizations, this whitepaper provides an overview of
SOA uses and benefits, an analysis of different approaches to
enabling SOA, contrasting between “top-down” and
“bottom-up” approaches, and best practices for
selecting a SOA solution.

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Why SOA? Uses and benefits

Fundamentally, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a model

of infrastructure architecture and an approach to internal
application development. Before SOA emerged in the early
2000s, enterprise infrastructures consisted of multiple
applications, typically developed in-house, to provide a new
business service or automate a particular business process.
Often, applications for related business processes contained
duplicate functionalities, with the same code existing in several
internal programs. For example, if multiple applications
required a credit check, each would duplicate the code, leading
to wasted money and development effort. As infrastructures
became more complex, it was increasingly difficult for
developers to maintain and support multiple code bases.
Businesses lost agility. If the credit-check process needed to be
changed, multiple developers updated multiple applications,
slowing down the entire modification process. These overly
complex and poorly designed applications had substantial
impact on the top and bottom lines of an organization.
The breakthrough of SOA was to design infrastructure
architecture around services rather than entire applications. In
such an architecture, the emphasis is on creating components
called services, which are small, discrete units of software that
provide a specific functionality and can be reused in every
application. In a SOA model, developers create new applications
by orchestrating a collection of services instead of building out
an entire software application. In this way, they eliminate code
redundancies. For instance, in SOA a simple bank loan
application would be a composite of credit-status-check
services, interest-rate services, and customer-data services.

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 “SOA breaks down the islands of business logic
and data that are scattered across multiple,
disparate applications. In the new enterprise
era, these silos may exist in on-premises or
cloud-based software, SaaS applications, or in
devices brought from home by employees.”

In short, SOA breaks down the islands of business logic and

data that are scattered across multiple, disparate applications.
In the new enterprise era, these silos may exist in on-premises
or cloud-based software, SaaS applications, or devices brought
from home by employees. SOA enables interoperability across
all silos through integration, making it easier and faster to
automate business processes.
The benefits of SOA are plenty. By improving the agility of IT
systems and business processes, enterprises can better
respond to changes in the market and innovate new products
to stay competitive. At the same time, they can reduce the bloat
and complexity inherent in legacy systems, increase developer
productivity by making software design more intuitive, and
lower IT costs associated with maintenance and upgrades.

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Best practices for selecting a SOA solution

There are several different approaches to implementing SOA

and selecting the right solution for mission-critical
environments. It is a common mistake, however, for
enterprises to jump into a lengthy and costly IT project without
fully evaluating overall business objectives, technical
considerations, and project requirements.
When selecting a SOA solution, top questions to ask include:

Business objectives
›› How is my industry changing and what short-term and
long-term needs will I need to address?
›› How can I efficiently address current needs while
establishing a framework for future growth?
›› What new business services do I plan to offer
(e.g., SaaS or APIs)?
›› Does my current infrastructure support agile growth and
provide enough flexibility to quickly pivot to
changing business needs?
›› Which SOA solution provides the best return on
investment (ROI)?

Technical considerations
›› Does my SOA solution provide support for all of the
technologies in my IT environment?
›› How does my SOA solution integrate on-premises and
cloud applications? Can both types of endpoints be
integrated on a unified platform?
›› Can my SOA solution be used with application servers,
development tools, etc. from different vendors or will it
force vendor lock-in?

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Project requirements
›› What is the timeline of my SOA initiative? How quickly can I
implement my solution and be productive?
›› What are the upfront licensing costs of my SOA solution?
What is the total cost of ownership (TCO), including
additional hardware and software costs, ongoing
maintenance, developer training, etc.?
›› How will I staff my SOA project? Do my in-house developers
possess the knowledge and skills required to implement my
solution or will they need additional training?
›› Does my project require the expertise of an external
consultant? How much will that cost?

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“Top-down” SOA

When enterprises first adopted SOA, many opted for a “top-

down” approach. This entailed launching a single
organization-wide SOA initiative and selecting a closed
proprietary SOA stack from a big vendor such as IBM or Oracle.
Once purchased, the company would begin a planned rollout
process, often with the help of consultants. The company’s
development team would then learn the product and use it to
re-architect all existing systems as well as design new
applications according to SOA principles. These developers
would have to throw out their existing tools, processes, and skill
sets and be heavily retrained on the new solution. Comprised of
multiple products, including application servers, enterprise
service buses, orchestration engines, management tools, and
development tools, proprietary SOA stacks provided a relatively
robust and reliable platform for service orchestration and
integration. Nonetheless, using a SOA stack to implement a
top-down initiative posed a number of disadvantages.
First, such a strategy entailed high upfront costs. On top of
licensing costs for each product in a typical stack (usually half a
dozen or more), enterprises often needed to purchase new
hardware to meet the system requirements of these products.
In addition to the upfront costs needed to procure the
necessary software and hardware, ongoing maintenance of
each of these components required further capital outlays. A
top-down SOA approach thus demanded a huge investment of
financial resources, with minimal guarantee of a good return.
A second major disadvantage of a top-down approach is that it
usually involves a lengthy, multiyear rollout period. A full SOA
implementation requires the deployment and configuration of
each product in the stack — a complicated process that can
take several years to complete. In the interim, development
projects and integration needs cannot be properly addressed.

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Moreover, since a top-down approach demands a monolithic
architectural shift, many organizations fall into the “rip and
replace” trap, attempting to simultaneously change existing
hardware and software systems as well as development
processes in a single shot.
Finally, proprietary SOA stacks are vendor-specific. This means
that companies usually have to purchase individual components
from a single vendor, which drastically limits IT’s flexibility. As
many proprietary stacks lack cloud extensibility, this may
prevent new enterprise organizations from integrating mission-
critical endpoints. Moreover, because proprietary stacks only
work with vendor-specific development tools, staffing top-down
SOA initiatives becomes a major challenge. Companies can
either hire vendor-specific SOA specialists, who command
salaries that are 30% more than general Java developers, or pay
for an expensive training program to bring current IT staff up to
speed. Even once complete, the scarcity of these developers
can create bottlenecks in projects when compared to teams of
IT generalists.
Given these pitfalls, it’s not surprising that nearly 80% of all
top-down SOA initiatives that were launched over the past
decade ultimately failed, resulting in millions of dollars and
hundreds of developer hours wasted. For the remaining 20%
who successfully implemented their top-down SOA initiatives,
the differentiator was the availability of ample financial and
human resources to invest in a costly and lengthy
infrastructure overhaul. Most organizations, then and now,
simply do not have such resources at their disposal. SOA,
however, is still critical to business growth and success.

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“Bottom-up” SOA

Despite the failures of many top-down initiatives, SOA can be

achieved without prohibitive costs or major dislocations to
existing IT infrastructures. A bottom-up approach — one that
emphasizes incremental adoption rather than wholesale
re-engineering — is key to success.
In a bottom-up approach to SOA, companies start with a stand-
alone enterprise service bus (ESB) or integration platform as a
service (iPaaS) instead of a full proprietary stack. As one of the
core components of a SOA stack, ESBs and iPaaS solutions
enable the creation and orchestration of services without
requiring an application server or other infrastructure
components. This provides a lightweight alternative and
eliminates the high upfront costs of implementing SOA with a
heavy proprietary stack. And instead of a lengthy rollout period,
a stand-alone ESB or iPaaS can be implemented and deployed
immediately to address current needs, enabling developers to
build reusable interfaces while also establishing a core
framework for integrating with a SOA governance model down
the road. Enterprises no longer need to rip and replace their
entire infrastructure to achieve SOA, but can adopt
it incrementally.
Perhaps most importantly, a stand-alone ESB or iPaaS does not
require specialized developer knowledge or costly training
programs. Development teams can start building SOA projects
from the bottom up in a fraction of the time it takes to learn
how to use the vendor-specific components and tools of a
proprietary stack. This also makes it easier to hire IT staff,
control salaries, and onboard new employees in light of the
high turnover that is prevalent among development teams. In
the end, bottom-up approaches allow organizations to develop
an efficient team of generalist developers as opposed to a
limited number of “specialists.”

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Case study: FTSE 100 company

A leading U.K. food retailer and FTSE 500 company also used a
bottom-up approach to SOA with a cloud-based integration
solution. Operating in a competitive retail market, the company
needed innovative ways to drive in-store revenue while also
expanding into new product categories and channels on the
web. As critical data existed in both cloud and on-premises
applications, the SOA solution they identified also needed
extensibility on both sides of the corporate firewall.
To bring existing customer and product data into the
company’s new Salesforce solution, the company selected
Anypoint Platform™, the enterprise-class integration platform
as a service (iPaaS) from MuleSoft. Anypoint Platform delivered
real-time application integration of the retailer’s on-premises
and SaaS applications. As a result, the company now enjoys a
single view of the customer to support multichannel marketing
online, in the call center, and at the supermarket
checkout register.
Compared to top-down approaches, organizations adopting
bottom-up SOA approaches achieve faster time to ROI, lower
risk, and better employee utilization. Milestones for bottom-up
approaches are measured in products deployed, not
consultants hired, developers trained, or components released.
In the long run, bottom-up approaches to SOA can produce
architectures equal to or greater in benefit than top-down
ones, while delivering value along the way and allowing for a
more flexible and manageable rollout.

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Mule runtime engine and Anypoint
Platform™: the best way to enable SOA

MuleSoft provides the world’s leading integration platform.

Mule runtime engine and MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform are
especially well suited for a bottom-up approach to SOA,
allowing enterprises to get up and running quickly while laying
a strong foundation for incremental adoption of a full
SOA infrastructure.
With Mule runtime engine and Anypoint Platform,
enterprises can:

›› Expose and integrate existing systems as services to

leverage current IT investments.
›› Address immediate integration challenges while
establishing a backbone for SOA initiatives.
›› Implement SOA at a pace that makes sense for their needs.
›› Connect on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications on a
unified integration platform.
›› Develop once, deploy anywhere with consistent, easy-to-use
development tooling.
Unlike heavyweight SOA stacks, Mule runtime engine is
lightweight and flexible, and takes the complexity out of
integration. As an open, best-of-breed platform, it can be used
stand-alone or with any other component you choose to build
SOA projects. In addition, Mule is easy to learn and understand,
allowing any Java developer to become productive quickly
without specialized training. When combined with MuleSoft’s
iPaaS integration platform (Anypoint Platform), MuleSoft offers
the only unified integration platform for connecting anything,
anywhere. It is, simply put, the best way to enable SOA in
your organization.

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Over 1,600 organizations rely on Anypoint Platform to connect
their applications, data, and devices, including leading
companies such as Walmart.com, MasterCard, The Coca-Cola
Company, and Netflix, as well as 5 of the world’s top 10 global
banks and 6 of the top 10 global consumer goods companies.
Join these organizations in taking a modern, bottom-up
approach to SOA. MuleSoft can help you evaluate your key SOA
challenges and objectives and develop an agile architecture to
help you succeed in coming years.

Learn how connectivity can power your organization. View

more at MuleSoft’s Solutions for SOA

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Learn more about SOA

Blog posts and resources

›› API-led connectivity: the next step in the evolution of SOA

›› The evolution of SOA: deliver on the initial promise of SOA
›› Enterprise service bus vs. traditional SOA

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About MuleSoft

MuleSoft, a Salesforce company

MuleSoft’s mission is to help organizations change and
innovate faster by making it easy to connect the world’s
applications, data, and devices. With its API-led approach to
connectivity, MuleSoft’s market-leading Anypoint Platform™
empowers over 1,600 organizations in approximately 60
countries to build application networks. By unlocking data
across the enterprise with application networks, organizations
can easily deliver new revenue channels, increase operational
efficiency, and create differentiated customer experiences.
For more information, visit mulesoft.com

MuleSoft is a registered trademark of MuleSoft, LLC., a Salesforce company.

All other marks are those of respective owners.