The core principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- standards-based interfaces and reusable services -- and its benefits -- system reuse, incremental adoption, and multi-vendor support -- are impossible to ignore for organizations with tight budgets and the need to adapt their systems to a dynamic business environment. The SOA marketplace is full of solutions that will help organizations service-enable their existing apps, build new services, and tie services together into an orchestrated composite app. But what about the vendor's own products? Is SOA good enough to bet the farm on large, sophisticated commercial apps?

ABPP's SOA foundation

i2 Technologies, the supply chain management vendor, is pushing its own SOA-fueled solution called the Agile Business Process Platform (ABPP). ABPP is built to work with i2's own solution modules as well as integrate with the existing systems of its customers, including those from competitors. You can view ABPP as a marketing necessity for a vendor that has struggled for years with declining revenue, financial restatements, and stock delistings; or you can see its release as an effort critical to the company's long-term survival. It's really both.

Without ABPP, the media and analysts would write off i2 as a troubled supplier of yesterday's technology. But the media and analysts are always swayed by what is shiny and new, and ABPP, built on an SOA core has the look and feel of something modern that is inline with major industry trends. It has that appealing, metaphorical "new car" smell

Part of a critical incremental deployment approach 

i2's ABPP fits in with its high-level "continuous process improvement" concept, a message that dovetails perfectly with how organizations are enhancing and adding new functionality to their business systems. The processes, standards-based interfaces, and extensive use of XML means that an ABPP customer can make incremental improvements to their systems. Given an industry-wide history of failed large-scale system deployments, the pervasive risk aversity of most CIOs, and overall IT budget constraints, solutions that can deliver incremental enhancements with defined and measurable return on investment (ROI) will help align i2's desire to get its foot into organizations with those organization's need to judiciously invest in next-generation solutions.

While vendor's have been hyping their service-based offerings for some time, potential buyers of SOA-based solutions like ABPP can test its capabilities with limited exposure. If the prospect has already front-ended their legacy apps with service interfaces or is looking to hook up newer, service-savvy solutions, proof of concept and pilot activities can be relatively quick. And given the componetized nature of the i2 solution, small portions of an initiative can be attempted at a time, with direct links to new business capability and business improvement.

A continuing trend

The adoption of SOA technology on both the user an vendor sides will ensure that over time, IT integration and system enhancement will be a simpler and more measurable endeavor. Along with other vendor solutions, i2's ABPP offering further ties systems to business processes, enabling IT to more directly influence the capabilities of the business, and for the business to begin to see that IT can be an enabler, not just an obstacle that must be overcome.