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G. R Raju
Chief Technology Officer & Head - Insurance Practice. |
With over 29 years of international experience, primarily in Technical Management positions, G R Raju joined Hexaware in 1999 as Chief Technology Officer and currently, also heads the Insurance Practice. He contributes significantly to thought leadership in new technology / Business areas. Raju has worked in large, multi-national corporations such as Tata Consultancy Services in India and Syntel across the globe in locations such as Singapore,Germany,Sweden. Major responsibilities in these positions include large project management, business development and practice development
Raju holds a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Regional Engineering College, India and a Masters in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the Indian Institute of Technology, India. Raju has also conducted numerous seminars and training programs on subjects like Quality Assurance, CASE & Networks and Analysis & Design. |
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Q1. What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and how is it different?
SOA is an architectural approach to IT and business that considers business processes as reusable components or services that are independent of applications and the computing platforms.
It is a paradigm shift from the traditional architectures (like Host centric, Client/Server and Distributed systems), focusing on business process, empowering business users and enabling high level of reuse of IT assets in the form of “Services”.
Unlike other architectures, SOA is unconstrained by programming languages or by legacy or existing systems. Broadly adopted services ensure well-defined interfaces. Before, proprietary standards limited interoperability. SOA services are linked dynamically and flexibly. Prior to this, service interactions were hard coded and dependent on the application |
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Q2. Is it true that SOA is applicable only to the new technologies based initiatives and not for any legacy applications?
It is not true. As you know,,majority of the existing business logic, in large to medium sized corporations, is embedded in the legacy systems. No enterprise level SOA implementation is possible unless the legacy systems participate. There are tools available to enable the legacy applications into service providers as well as service consumers and leveraging this mission critical applications, organizations develop new composite applications. |
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Q3. How can a Mainframe based application be deployed in an SOA environment ?
The simplest way to make a mainframe application participate in an SOA is to “wrap” the existing application interfaces using SOA wrappers, thus, creating SOA services that can be registered to an SOA management facility on a new platform, but implemented via the exiting legacy code.
SOA Enablement often involves communicating with the existing application on its current platform. However, applications can also be re-hosted (Windows or Unix). SOA enablement is useful because the re-hosted application components, new Java components, COTS components, and the orchestration engine that brings them all together, will reside on the same platform, avoiding inter-machine communication. |
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Q4. Who are the leaders in the SOA platform space? Have you partnered with anyone in this initiative?
The leaders in the SOA platform and products include IBM, BEA, ORACLE, Microsoft, Software AG, TIBCO, SAP, HP etc. Hexaware has partnered with IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle .There has been an aggressive consolidation of SOA technology players. Some of the recent consolidations include: |
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IBM, leads the pack ,acquiring DataPower, Bowstreet and Webify. |
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Software AG which acquired webMethods, Inc., which acquired Infravio, "the SOA governance company" with its registry/repository offering. |
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BEA acquired Fuego, adding a crucial element BPM to its AquaLogic SOA platform product line. |
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HP acquired Mercury, which acquired Instinet |
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Q5. What are the key competencies that Hexaware has built in SOA and how are you gearing up to face the SOA challenge?
The increase in the SOA adoption rate provides new opportunities as well as challenges to Hexaware. The opportunities, both from existing and prospective customers, would range from initial assessments of SOA readiness, analyzing the applications portfolio, Enterprise architecture, business modeling, SOA enabling or re-engineering legacy applications into services as part of SOA implementation, building new composite applications, to list a few.
As part of Tech COE, Hexaware has embarked on a program to build SOA expertise. While continuing to develop and deepen the J2EE, .Net and LM (IBM MF) areas, we are focusing on synergizing these competencies. By 2007, we will establish our SOA center around the 3 leading technology Players, IBM, BEA and Oracle. R&D projects to create reference SOA architecture on these platforms and to collaborate with the vertical competencies, have been completed. SOA technology labs have been setup and the training and certification process is in progress. |
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Q6. In keeping with the increase in the SOA adoption rate,what are the key services that Hexaware offers as part of the SOA CoE ?
Like any other new technology wave, the industry is in different stages of the SOA adoption. Hexaware is leveraging the existing and upgraded partnerships with these SOA platform vendors to become a significant partner in the SOA services space.
Hexaware has the following competencies and resources to offer as our key SOA services:
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Readiness Assessment covering Enterprise architecture and SOA roadmap, ROI analysis to demonstrate the value of SOA and analysis of candidate applications to form the basis of an SOA. |
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Reference implementations of SOA to build the competency on service virtualization and orchestration. |
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SOA enablement of legacy (C/S & M/F Apps) into web services to be consumed by SOA applications. |
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Business Process Management: enabling advanced integration through modeling, integrating, monitoring and managing of current and new processes within a company and across the value chain of partners and customers. |
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Q7. If any organization has not yet initiated any step in the SOA direction, what is your recommendation and how do you think that Hexaware can help?
For many of the organizations that are beginning to take an SOA initiative, Hexaware can provide initial education in the form of an interactive workshop and carve out an assessment program. This will examine the current state and help identify the gaps to build a road map for the phased adaptation of SOA. Post assessment, Hexaware can undertake developing an SOA reference implementation, specific to the client’s business and the current IT environment. |
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