Any CIO grappling with the question of how to derive optimum scalability, integration, security and performance out of his existing systems, will do well to consider SOA, said Timothy M. Bryan, Chairman & CEO of leading applications vendor GalaxESolutions®. SOA is an enterprise-wide approach towards application integration -- optimize business processes and rewrite the rules of IT governance by viewing all applications as services.
SOA-based systems have gained in popularity after vendors have come up with niche skillsets in areas like Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V, service level management, performance monitoring, quality assurance and privacy and security validation procedures. Today, IV&V in particular, is a mandatory first step towards leveraging SOA-based architectures for existing systems, said Bryan. He said GalaxE has a tie-up with Mercury Interactive to carry out IV&V procedures on the systems of its customers in India.
SOA transcends the need to scale up systems across the board and is highly recommended in countries where legacy systems abound, said Bryan. He calls it the ability to successfully use application and domain skillsets to successfully "blend technical and business imperatives". "It's both science and art. SOA calls for technical architecture changes as well as business process changes and everyone now understands the amount of returns which a properly implemented SOA framework can give you.
Customers across the financial services, insurance, health sciences, retail, manufacturing
and telecom sectors worldwide have been the fastest SOA adopters," he said. Manhattan-headquartered GalaxESolutions®, a sister concern of Galaxy Systems,Inc., has development centers in the US, Canada and India. It currently has tech exchange partnerships in the SOA market, with the likes of BEA, Microsoft and ITAA worldwide.
In India, GalaxESolutions® services over half a dozen customers, and as its headcount increases, the company looks set to widen its delivery model further from offshore processes to a combination of onsite, offsite, offshore and nearshore processes.
The company's scale-up through fiscal 2007 will be in line with the increasing number of large corporations outsourcing SOA-based development and maintenance work to Indian companies like TCS, Wipro and Infosys. Globally, GalaxESolutions® competes in the SOA architecturing and support space with companies like CSC, IBM, Accenture and BearingPoint. Its clients include Medco Health Solutions, Liberty Mutual, Coach Leatherware and Ford Foundation.
GalaxESolutions® expansion strategy in Bangalore will focus on increasing its current 125-strong workforce to 300 by June 2007. Globally, the company employs over 300 people and will ramp up to 500 people by next year. With the Indian phase of its expansion plans set to gather steam in the coming months, GalaxE plans to design and deploy 70% of its IT architecture out of India. GalaxESolutions® will finetune its remote infrastructure management skills further through its Indian operations, company officials said, adding that the Bangalore delivery center would focus on end-to-end solutions in deploying shared enterprise services for Fortune 500 companies.
"Apart from offsetting the pressures of migrating legacy systems to more current hardware, SOA has increasingly become an opportunity to retool existing business processes. Enterprises adopting SOAs can always limit the cost of deployment as their business requirements increase. Today, organizations are realizing that applications bringing up one part of the business can be made available without boundaries to other parts of the business. More and more companies are realizing the need to capitalize on the systems and business benefits of SOA," said Bryan.
SOAs is one of the fastest growing markets in the systems maintenance and applications development segment of the IT market. Currently a $5-billion market, SOA configuration and maintenance support is on course to become a $50 billion market by 2010, say analysts. |