Like Movable Type

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) make business procedures more flexible. T-Systems creates SOA systems so that they manage your business from start to finish.

Customers can start using their mobile phone after they sign a new contract with a provider in just a couple of minutes. Provider E-Plus activates new customers unusually fast, because for several months now it has been running a software component called order prioritization that monitors which working processes have priority at any one moment. And new customers are at the very top of the list.

It was T-Systems that supplied Germany’s third-largest mobile-phone provider with its central integration platform. It was designed in accordance with the requirements of SOA end-to-end management. “End-to-end”, explains project leader Christoph Niessen, “means that the system manages all the user’s processes from start to finish.” SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture, which is based on the most important modern organizational approach for complex IT systems.

The basic idea behind it is actually quite simple: Whereas users often had to adapt their business procedures to the IT, IT experts now take precisely the opposite approach when designing SOA systems. A company’s business procedures are broken down into their constituent steps, which are called services. And for each of these services the architects create an individual software component or part of an application. The individual components communicate through a central software component: the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Quick and easy

This modular structure of the IT landscape has a number of advantages. “An SOA system“, says Prof. Johannes Siedersleben, chief software architect at T-Systems and head of its multidisciplinary Horizontal and Architecture area, “is to conventional IT landscapes as a book printing press with movable type is to machines with fixed, cast printing plates.” Like the type, services are quick and easy to rearrange. This means that users can model new business procedures again and bring products to market quickly.

T-Systems is one of the leading providers of SOA systems. “We combine experience with both sector and technological expertise along the entire value chain,” says Evgeni Dimitrov, the project leader of T-System’s SOA End-to-End Management. “In the procedural model developed by T-Systems”, adds his colleague Stefan Rössler, “the customer’s business requirements are at center-stage.” And when customers adapt their business procedures and IT landscapes to the SOA principles in the course of this process, they create the preconditions for the next step: Real ICT. Because information technology and telecommunications can be smoothly amalgamated via standardized SOA interfaces.

Read more about the possibilities of SOA in the current print version.