SOA application transformation

Fundamentally SOA is about integrating your existing IT systems. To re-use them in new flexible business processes, their functionality needs to be exposed as a set of cross-functional services. A vast majority of existing systems require some amount of transformational effort that can overcome the existing technological limitations, data model inconsistencies, and the inability to support required performance/availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

This process has many similarities with our Legacy System Rejuvenation Service. Exigen Services engineers conduct the assessment phase, perform reverse engineering of a large-scale application into business functions, and examine the code base, downtime statistics and the support log. Based on the accumulated information, they produce a cost benefit analysis for the application transformation and complete re-implementation options.

In the context of SOA application transformation, several important aspects need particular attention. One is establishing a proper test environment, since most of our customers only have one environment with the legacy application operating in the production mode. This can be due to the complexity of the systems’ interdependencies or the size of the legacy application itself. Our goal would be to either replicate the production environment completely or emulate the systems that cannot be instantiated.

Each legacy application has its own authentication, authorization, and other security-related concepts. Balancing them can be a challenging task, requiring identity transfer techniques based on SAML, Kerberos, or other proprietary mechanisms. Our application security practice ensures that the implemented schema is robust and reliable.

Last, but not least, are performance requirements. The Exigen Services performance engineering approach reveals bottlenecks within the target application that prevent companies from meeting SLAs. Depending on the technology, our engineers refactor identified modules, improving their overall performance and scalability by making them cluster- or cloud- friendly.

Exigen Services has expertise with many technologiesand platforms such as x86, Sparc, mainframes (IBM, HP, Fujitsu Siemens). We’ve completed many enterprise application integration projects that enable our customers to access their valuable data and business services more efficiently.