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SOA for B2B commerce

Implement more flexible and dynamic IT connections

By Eric Pulier and Hugh Taylor, JavaWorld.com, 11/28/05

We live in an era of "virtual" corporations, rapid product lifecycles, and ever-changing alliances between businesses. These trends put increasing pressure on companies to find flexible, innovative ways to connect with their partners, customers, and suppliers—known in IT circles as business-to-business (B2B) commerce. However, while the Internet has proven a boon to some aspects of B2B commerce, many critical B2B operations remained mired in the rigid and costly territory of traditional enterprise architectures. In general, IT connections between businesses are difficult to maintain and complex to change.

With their inherent flexibility and vendor neutrality, Web services and the SOA (service-oriented architecture) provide a method by which modern B2B commerce can be implemented in a flexible and economical manner. Web services and the SOA enable more dynamic and cost effective B2B commerce, and this article examines ways in which they make this happen.

Before we get started, I want to start you thinking in terms of the interplay between business process and IT. After all, most IT exists because a business or organization requires it. In general, IT supports business processes. Too often, business strategies are hostage to the rigid IT infrastructure that has developed over the years, failing to take into account that the whole reason IT exists in the first place is to make the business itself more competitive. This article deals with the ways in which IT can be made to support business processes as they evolve.

When two companies become partners, their respective enterprise architectures become partners, too. In customer-supplier relationships such as manufacturing supply-chain management and partner relationships such as airlines and car rental firms or auto manufacturers and dealers, traditional enterprise architectures have proven inflexible and problematic. The systems and their interfaces cannot keep pace with the changes in these relationships. Web services can enable these systems to connect with greater agility.

Example: Managing the supply chain

Supply-chain management is one area of B2B commerce that provides some fertile opportunities for an SOA. To see how the SOA can improve B2B commerce in this area, let's examine a simplified example of a manufacturing company with two plants. As shown in Figure 1, the business process for supply-chain management at this company dictates that if one plant runs out of a particular part, then its ERP (enterprise resource planning) system sends a message to a computer at headquarters (HQ), which then automatically queries the ERP system situated at the other plant to see if it has that item in stock. If the other plant does not have the item, then the HQ computer sends an electronic order to the supplier's ERP system. The top half of Figure 1 shows the map of this business process.

Figure 1. For each step in the business process, there is a matching set of system functionality or interaction between systems. Click on thumbnail to view full-sized image.

The lower half of Figure 1 shows the enterprise architecture needed to support this business process. To support the company's inventory query and supply ordering, the enterprise architecture requires that four systems be connected using three proprietary interfaces. The mainframe at the first plant connects to the Windows-based servers at headquarters, which in turn connects with the minicomputer at the second plant and the Sun box at the supplier. As we have seen, this tightly coupled integration can prove to be inflexible as well as costly to modify and maintain. For instance, in the current architecture, the addition of new suppliers, competitive bidding on supplier contracts, and the like would be complex and expensive to implement.

Converting to an SOA opens up a number of new possibilities for conducting B2B commerce without significant reworking of the underlying systems. As shown in Figure 2, in addition to eliminating the proprietary interfaces, the SOA makes it easily possible for the first plant to check directly with the second plant and place orders without going through the HQ computer, as it is now configured. Of course, it would be possible to make that change to the architecture in the traditional method of modifying the interfaces, but that would be a far more complex and time-consuming task. The HQ system can now monitor the transaction flow passively using its own Web service, which can digest the SOAP messages that travel back and forth between the second plant and the supplier.

Figure 2. With an SOA, supporting the B2B business process from Figure 1 takes place with a series of Web services transactions. Click on thumbnail to view full-sized image.

To see how the SOA can dramatically increase the potential for B2B commerce, look at Figure 3. The manufacturer now wants to institute an electronic competitive bidding system for its orders. The suppliers who want to bid on the opportunity to win business from the manufacturer can connect to the bidding system through a Web service. Once again, this is certainly possible to do with traditional distributed computing technology, but at a much greater cost. The costs are so high, in fact, that such systems are rarely built, and, when built, rarely change without considerable pain. With the advent of the SOA, however, this kind of B2B commerce can easily take shape. The manufacturer gains the ability to manage its suppliers and costs more effectively, and the suppliers gain the ability to win new business. Further, when suppliers are replaced or new suppliers added, IT can now respond quickly and inexpensively to the business decisions.

Figure 3. SOA simplifies change management. Click on thumbnail to view full-sized image.

The UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) features of Web services make the new SOA paradigm that much simpler to implement as well. If a supplier wants to become part of the bidding system, its software developers can access the specifications of the manufacturer's bidding Web service using the manufacturer's registry of available services. The supplier's software developers can process the WSDL document and derive the correct policy information that will be required to interoperate with the Web services–based bidding system. The UDDI and WSDL gives these SOA features the ability to scale rapidly. If 10,000 suppliers need to sign on to the bidding system, they can do it largely without disturbing anyone at the manufacturer. Now, in reality, developers will call each other to exchange information and make sure they are working correctly, but in terms of relatively effortless scaling, the SOA enables improvement an order of magnitude greater than the architectures based on proprietary interoperability.

Discuss

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Subject Replies Last post
. Great Marketing...
By deistprogressive 		0 11/29/05 01:26 PM
by Anonymous
. great article
By Anonymous 		0 11/28/05 03:09 PM
by Anonymous
. SOA for B2B commerce
By JavaWorld 		0 11/23/05 06:01 PM
by JavaWorld


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