Got SOA? Got BI?

JBoss World Berlin provided me some fresh insight into the challenges associated with providing Business Intelligence in a Service Oriented Architecture. The show itself was vibrant, with the JBoss announcement of their new Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) taking centre stage. The conference provided yet more evidence that getting business insight from your SOA is an idea which is becoming broadly accepted.

History shows us that wherever you build applications, or deploy packaged apps, there is always a need for BI. It’s no different in SOA. Traditional query based BI doesn’t fit well in SOA – but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to need it. If fact with every SOA project it’s a matter of time before this requirement hits every project.

Here’s a specific scenario for one customer we discussed this with: The IT team from a leading company built and deployed a mission critical application using SOA. Within a matter of a few days after the go-live, business operations were asking for information about the transactions processed. As often happens, Business Intelligence hadn’t been mandated as a requirement for the project, and as a result it wasn’t built in. Unfortunately since the application had been distributed across multiple servers, multiple log files have to be extracted, transformed and loaded into a database. Because of the data volumes involved, the queries perform appallingly, making the system practically unusable for the business.

Of course a much simpler and more elegant solution would have been to build visibility into the project from day one. Given the nature of the project, and a Service Oriented Architecture, it would have been much simpler to use event driven BI to analyze the message traffic in flight. In fact that’s what this company looks set to do.