Discover the Value of Service-Oriented Architecture

By Jennifer Hanniman, Product Marketing, Cognos 8 BI Platform and Architecture

As IT organizations implement business intelligence (BI) solutions, a fine balance must be struck between business user requirements and a solution that fits within your IT infrastructure, both as it exists today and in the future. From working with our customers, we found that many struggle with the demands to address the diverse needs of users, expand information use more broadly and manage an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. Addressing these challenges often result in an infrastructure that is expensive to maintain, delivers low end-user satisfaction, and an inability to respond quickly to changing IT or business requirements. Marketplace buzz continues about the value of an SOA approach because of its ability to address these IT challenges. In this article, we will discuss why Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), the foundation for the Cognos 8 BI Platform, provides the most effective approach to address the IT challenges of an enterprise BI solution.

Today's IT environment includes a multitude of access modes, applications, operating platforms, and data sources. These environments are also constantly changing, as IT drives towards creating the most cost-effective framework upon which to deliver IT services. To address the complexity of your IT infrastructure, enterprise business intelligence solution requirements extend beyond the traditional BI capabilities. An enterprise BI solution must:

• Meet service delivery commitments while minimizing burden on IT
• Leverage existing infrastructure
• Minimize components to deploy and maintain
• Ease integration points
• Scale to support mission-critical deployments
• Adopt new standards to deliver on new business requirements
• Easily adapt to change

These requirements demand an efficient, reliable and agile foundation upon which to build your BI solution.

An Architecture Comparison

When Cognos 8 was designed, it became apparent neither the client-server approach nor web services wrappers could provide the proper foundation upon which to build a robust BI solution.

A client-server architecture struggles to meet IT requirements in a cost effective manner because of the immense deployment and maintenance effort required to push the application out to an ever-increasing number of users, and sustain adequate reliability and integration with other applications.

Wrapping client-server components in Web services could resolve some of these issues and provide broader user access with easier maintenance for IT. However, this solution only helps in the short term as is not scalable and there are significant ongoing maintenance challenges with multiple products to maintain, multiple points of integration, and multiple security models.

An SOA approach is the only adequate response to demands for information access, requirements to drive user adoption, manage complexity, and prepare for your IT evolution to a services orientation in the coming years.

Table 1: An architecture comparison

	SOA	Web Services	Client Server
Efficiency
Leverage existing infrastructure and easily adapt to change	yes	no	no
Minimize solution components to deploy and maintain	yes	no	no
Reliability
Scale to support mission-critical deployments	yes	no	no
Meet service industry commitments while minimizing burden on IT	yes	no	no
Agility
Adopt new standards to deliver on new business requirements	yes	yes	no
Ease integration points to respond quickly to changing business needs	yes	yes	no

 

SOA Defined

The SOA approach involves seven key principles:

• Coarse-grained: Services are defined at business-level terms.
• Platform neutral: Services can work on different platforms, or a combination thereof.
• Location transparent: Services leverage the internet as the ubiquitous network and location is transparent to users and each other.
• Peer-to-peer: No service is considered more important than any other, and there is no concept of a master service.
• Loosely coupled: No service needs to know how the other services do their job, nor what they are doing at any particular time.
• Interface-based: Services communicate without requiring to know how each service works.
• Open and Standards Based: Services are built based on accepted standards which allow them to be integrated into solutions based on business need.

An architecture based upon these principles delivers efficiency, reliability and agility into the foundation upon which your BI solution is built.

The Cognos 8 BI Platform Demonstrates the Value of the SOA Approach

The Cognos 8 BI architecture was designed based on the seven key principles of an SOA architecture with the objective to deliver an efficient, reliable and agile BI solution.

A Single Set of Standards Based Services

One of the key value drivers of an SOA architecture is the re-use of services within an environment, minimizing the number of components to deploy and maintain. Cognos 8 is built upon a single set of services for all business intelligence capabilities. For example, there is a single query service across all BI capabilities (reporting, analysis, ad hoc query, scorecards, dashboards and event management). For IT, this means there are fewer moving parts to learn, deploy and maintain. For business, this delivers a single version of the truth, building user confidence in the system and,thereby reducing a key barrier to adoption.

The Cognos 8 BI Platform can "live" within your IT environment, even as it changes. This is because the services leverage modern standard interfaces and protocols including WSDL, WSRP and SQL. Platform transparency is achieved as all these services plug into the network using SOAP and XML internet protocols. You can leverage your existing IT investments such as operating systems, platforms routers and firewalls and be assured that, as your IT direction changes, your business user is not impacted.

For one of our customers, the ability to live within a changing IT environment was critical. They wanted an enterprise BI solution that would allow them to leverage their existing investment and adapt to anticipated changes in IT infrastructure. They chose the Cognos platform because:

• They could deploy the Cognos BI solution across the enterprise without adding burden to the IT resources.
• It could integrate easily with their multiple applications, operating systems and data sources .
• The service-oriented architecture delivered the flexibility needed to meet their existing infrastructure needs, as well as their future vision.

Peer-to-Peer Services

As BI solutions become mission-critical and extend across the enterprise, IT must have the confidence that the solution can meet new levels of service. User expectations must be consistently met, despite fluctuating periods of demand. For example, monthly, quarterly or annual reporting periods cause predictable spikes in reporting requests. The IT organization needs a cost-effective approach to manage these peak periods of usage and maintain system reliability commitments.

The Cognos 8 BI Platform delivers on this requirement through peer-to-peer services. With no master service, there is no single point of failure within the solution. Services are self-aware, meaning that they attempt to re-start upon failure and spawn to manage an increasing workload. Every service has built-in fault tolerance as any request can be handled by other services of that type in the configuration. If a service fails, the service will attempt to restart or the request can be re-allocated to any other service of the same type. Other types of services are not impacted by this failure. This provides tremendous reliability because the configuration has built-in redundancy to ensure uninterrupted access.

These peer-to-peer services are also loosely-coupled so no service needs to know how the other services do their job, what they are doing at any particular time, or even where they reside. This gives IT the flexibility to allocate services to different environments as resource demands change during the business cycle.

For one Cognos customer, faced with brief but consistent spikes in reporting activity, it was extremely important to find a way to effectively manage peak period usage. With SOA, the services were re-allocated across existing development and test environments to manage short-term incremental demand for resources. This eliminated the need for an additional hardware investment simply to meet peak usage needs and maintained commitments for system responsiveness.

Purpose Built Services and a Single, Open API

In order to drive BI adoption, BI needs to be available where the users work everyday - in their corporate portal, enterprise search, mobile devices, or BPM and other operational applications. Customers are no longer want a point solution to address a specific need, they are looking for a business intelligence partner who can deliver on today’s business requirements and adapt to changes in the future.

Cognos' single open API provides the interoperability to integrate into our customers' infrastructure. This gives all IT partners full access to BI functionality to build additional value and to integrate BI into your BPM, search or other infrastructure tools.

Our services are loosely-coupled, with each performing a discrete BI function. For example, the presentation layer rendering of results in HTML or PDF is separate from the query service in the data access layer. This independence enables the presentation tier to render whatever data is provided by the query service, without a hard-link between a data source and a BI capability. This has enabled us to add in new capabilities by quickly leveraging the power of our existing platform. For instance with Cognos 8 Go! Search, we were able to take advantage of all information available in the content manager service.

Cognos 8 BI Delivers on the Promise of SOA

Value	Benefit
	Delivered Via	To IT	To Business
Efficiency	Single set of standards-based objectives	Fewer moving parts to deploy and maintain	Shorten time to adoption
Reliability	Peer-to-Peer Services	No single point of failure	Builds user confidence
Agility	Purpose-built services and a single open API	Deliver on changing user requirements	Deliver on changing user requirements

 

Your Enterprise BI solution does not live in a vacuum – it must be able to fit within an increasingly complex IT environment and provide IT with the ability to respond quickly to changing business needs. The Cognos 8 BI platform, built upon a services-oriented architecture, delivers an efficient, reliable and agile business intelligence solution.

For more information... Check out the TechTalk Webinar entitled "Discover the value of service-oriented architecture" to learn more about how Cognos 8 has leveraged the principles of an SOA approach to deliver value to our customers. For more information, please e-mail jennifer.hanniman@cognos.com.