Business Integration and SOA Process

Our more than 250 successful integration and SOA systems projects – including some of the largest ever undertaken – have given us the insight and experience necessary to create industry-leading SOA services and solutions that quickly add value to enterprise technology systems by providing proven, out-of-the-box services for common utility functions required for SOA.

Review our SOA process below to see how Perficient's experts can provide a comprehensive SOA services solution for your organization.

Contact us to discuss SOA systems and IT services.

HEALTH CHECK AND READINESS ASSESSMENT

Perficient has been engaged many times to help turn around struggling SOA projects. To this end, we have developed a fast-paced SOA Health Check program. This program is typically conducted in a 3-4 day timeframe, during which time we interview the key parties in the SOA effort and produce a formal report recommending corrective actions. Each interview session will be documented to represent the current state of the SOA services effort. We then conduct a gap analysis of the current state against our best practices. Our deliverable is a report benchmarking your SOA efforts against the best practices we have developed across our many client engagements with recommended corrective actions.

The intent of the health check is to create a set of actionable tasks to get the SOA process and project(s) on track to ensure proper ROI. The SOA Health Check provides the following benefits:

Provides a benchmark of your current SOA approach with industry best practices Leverages Perficient’s baseline architecture, lifecycle methodology and operational guide
Delivers a set of actionable tasks that can then be estimated for feasibility and ROI
Helps ensure your SOA projects are on track to achieve technical and business objectives

ROADMAP

With the initial SOA process planning completed during Perficient’s SOA Health Check and Readiness Assessment, the vision of SOA can be socialized across IT and among business stakeholders. The next step is to develop a more formal SOA roadmap and blueprint that is rooted in strategic objectives.

Develop a Strategic Services Blueprint to specify the future state of the reusable services catalog
Create a business services roadmap detailing the priorities and timeline for building services based on business value, reuse, supported business processes and IT assets
Align the need for organization, people, process and technology change with the strategic objects in a rationalized and prioritized time line
Design and document the conceptual architecture needed to support the business services roadmap
Identify the initiatives necessary to build the architecture and processes to support the business services and create a high-level project plan for these tasks

SOA SYSTEMS BLUEPRINT

The SOA blueprint is a concrete realization of a strategic SOA plan, transforming the vision of the plan into actionable deliverables, goals and objectives. It provides a breakdown of proposed services, identified through domain decomposition and strategic planning, to which projects in the portfolio can be mapped. As a result, IT will have a more objective means for service discovery and realization, in addition to a formal representation of the value of the SOA as it evolves.

Furthermore, the impact of socializing the vision for SOA will produce new understanding, new candidate services and new opportunities for revenue and profit generation than existed before the roadmap vision is established.

The roadmap and service blueprint is the foundation of the SOA migration based on business value and objectives. The roadmap activities are defined in terms of people, processes, and technologies within the context of business-related projects to mature SOA disciplines together.

EDUCATION – SOA BOOTCAMP

A SOA effort limited to an architecture exercise will have limited success; your staff should also be trained with their specific role in mind. Perficient’s SOA Boot Camp training is the answer, offering courses on the design phase of developing a service-oriented solution from an architect's perspective.

Perficient provides you with our baseline agenda and suggested training modules for the roles within your organization. We then collaborate with you to customize the course materials by role, technology, processes and culture. Students learn service design principles and how to apply them to analyze, identify services and design a SOA solution. Hands-on exercises throughout the course enable students to apply SOA design techniques and improve their skills.

Our trainers are also hands-on consultants with real-world experience. We work with you to create relevant demonstrations and exercises specific to your tools and business problems. Our trainers often stay on-site after the course to mentor your staff though proof-of-concept or pilot projects.

QUICK START RULEBOOK

Our approach to SOA is supported first by a proven methodology, the Quick Start Rulebook™ (QSR). This methodology defines an object-oriented approach to designing integration interfaces, common business objects, integration domains and the common components and services to support SOA. Reusable services and design patterns are defined within the QSR lifecycle methodology. Learn more.

REUSABLE UTILITY SERVICES

You can learn more about our SOA technology here.

Audit Logger: The Generic Audit Logger (GAL) is a fully configurable message logger that records and can replay messages transmitted on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The administrator can configure the messages to be captured and viewable with a GUI-based message viewer using custom selection criteria such as date/time, topic, queue and transaction identifier.
Exception Handler: The Generic Exception Handler (GEH) is a GUI-based application for end users that provides a standardized service interface for applications to raise and handle errors. The administrator can configure the exception handler to define error resolution workflows, user groups and group-level security, and error descriptions by message identifier (topic or subject name). Exceptions that are not defined by the administrator will be accumulated in a common error handler so that no exceptions are lost.
SOA Gateway: The SOA Gateway provides a common interface for utility services that simplifies deploying SOA-based solutions. The gateway concept abstracts much of the complexity of SOA and eases development efforts.

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