SOI (Service Oriented Integration) and SIMM (Service Integration Maturity Model An Analysis

The constellation of SOA entities encompasses a triplet of Service consumer/provider and an optional registry. In the normal style, the service provider (“Service”) is instantiated and the details are stored in a registry. Service consumers seeking the required service explore the registry, locate the Service end points, receive the service contracts (normally as WSDLs), comply with the established contracts in order to consume the service. While this is an ideal scenario, in integration based environments the style differs where integration enablers as services are required to be built to aid integration. Thus Service Oriented integration (SOI) would mean the following depending on the type of players in the IT industry: To an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) who develops products, SOI would mean exposing loosely coupled interfaces to be consumed easily by abstracting the implementation; To a systems integrator, this would mean creating and hosting integration enablers as services( most of the times in the middleware layer) to be consumed by applications which in turn might fulfill the intended functionality by interacting with one or more back end applications. SIMM (Service Integration Maturity Model) defines a maturity model of such SOI based environments. This maturity model in turn will serve as an index to measure the level of flexibility and agility of an industry's IT Environment to the changing needs of the business which is the key goal of SOA. Though there are many factors affecting SIMM, standards and modularity play a key role. In this paper we intend to analyze SIMM characteristics, benefits of standards combined with modularity, different enterprise environments and suggest the relevance of standards in each environment. In section I, we briefly discuss the functionality of integration enablers and various patterns. In Section II, we discuss the SIMM characteristics combined with modularity, explore in detail the various types of enterprises and requirements to comply with standards to achieve greater SIMM and finally conclude.