Hidden Value of Services
When Web Services as we know them today were in their infancy I started to work with a customer that sold a market leading product. Their product was successful because of the rich supporting data source that helped their clients make intelligent decisions. But another differentiator was the willingness of the product supplier to customise the product to meet their clients specific requirements. Whilst this delivered enhanced value to the client and led to easier integration into existing processes, it increased both cost and delivery timescales for the product supplier. The level of customisation also created other issues including complicating maintenance and versioning.
So, the product supplier decided to take a service based approach. This involved identifying the different capabilities of the existing monolithic product, extracting them and creating a service for each. When the entire product functionality could be delivered by a collection of services, the services were orchestrated back together to in essence deliver the same capabilities of the original monolithic product.
Of course this approach led to a much more agile approach to customisation, which cost less and could be delivered in a more timely manner. But what was both fascinating and unexpected, was the realisation that the smaller granular capabilities delivered by the services were of interest to a broader spectrum of customers within new industry sectors.
So by taking a service based approach the product supplier not only increased its agility and reduced costs, it also increased the applicability of its product to new markets.
Simon Thurman
