Intel uses SOA to chip away at integration, project management issues

Intel Corporation reports that it has seen a return on investment "in excess of tens of millions of dollars" as a result of its three-year-old SOA effort.

Intel gradually moves from custom development to reuse of common services

This savings is measured from the reuse of common services within the company's SOA framework, said Steve Birkel, chief technical architect for Intel’s Information Technology, and author of a soon-to-be-published book, SOA Demystified. Birkel was recently interviewed in Thomas Erl's SOA Magazine.

Intel began to pilot some SOA projects back in 2004, Birkel related. Prior to SOA, there was a pain that was palpable:

"When Intel looked at the amount of resources we were putting into re-SOA integration - point-to-point types of integration -- we were really spending an inordinate amount of our development capacity in both developing and then sustaining those integrations as vendors would change their products.... We used several large enterprise vendors... These vendors were all offering parts of their capabilities through suites of services, but [we found that] none easily interoperated."

Intel's experiences are instructional for companies just getting their feet wet with SOA. First, the effort was introduced gradually, with ROI tracked for each phase of the rollout. Second, the company is emphasizing code or service reuse as the primary benefit to look for in the early stages of the process. And third, even in a technically savvy place such as Intel, the evolution to full-functioning SOA is taking time, up to several years, until tangible benefits start accruing.

At Intel, SOA efforts started small and were carefully measured. If they were seen as delivering ROI, the projects would be moved forward. "These proof of concepts were really developing the business case to say, if we go down the path of SOA, we would get a substantial amount of ROI out of it, and then basically prove our assertions through some technology and business process integrations," Birkel said.

The trick was to "get a balance between what investment we put into creating a service and then [keep track of how] it was reused, even a few times with a few projects. It was the balance required between investment in the service versus the return, and we have been able to do that. We did some calculations and identified a tipping point between the number of instances of reuse you get out of a service before you are likely to see a positive ROI for the effort that went into it."

In the next phase, Birkel's team "began to develop and deploy some higher level business services that were able to be consumed and reused." The main benefit so far has been reuse of services, he explained. "...you save every time you re-utilize the service in the process of developing a solution. ...We were benefiting from the fact that developers were increasingly accustomed to thinking about reuse first and doing custom development second." Intel has been measuring this reuse, and Birkel estimates that his company has gained "in excess of tens of millions of dollars worth of reuse value."

Intel is still early in its SOA development, Birkel admitted. Ultimately, within the next five years, he would like to see Intel grow a "significant pool of services" from which project managers and developers can draw from. "Right now, we still have a very substantial number of project managers and software developers that are tasked to bring out custom software and a few folks that are working on common services. ...I would like to see that almost flip over."

Among the benefits of such a service-oriented approach would be projects that are shorter in duration, and thus require less project management, Birkel adds. "Today, it takes many months to create a business solution the way we approach development. Five years from now, I would like it to be a relatively short process that is really optimized around the assembly of those services into solutions."

In addition, Birkel would like to be able to pick and choose components, menu style, from vendors, versus having to be entire out-of-the-box solutions. SOA will make this granularity possible.