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Looking For A Mobile Strategy -- Think SOA First

Business Services are key to a successful mobile strategy.

As you may already know, Apple is releasing the new iPhone 3.0 on June 19th. Palm recently introduced the Palm Pre as a viable competitor that not only offers the large touch-screen but also a slide out keyboard for those in need of one. The BlackBerry continues its dominance as the "business-class smartphone". Microsoft Windows Mobile devices offer familiarity with your everyday business applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With so many mobile options available on the market today and employees/customers expecting information to be instantly available to them no matter what corner of the globe they may be in, no wonder more and more companies are finding themselves trying to define a mobile strategy quickly.

Unfortunately, one of the major requirements of a mobile strategy is that the mobile device acts as nothing more than a front end display – after all, everyone I know is in love with their iPhone because of its "look and feel", and definitely not its computing power. Before this new version 3.0, cut and paste functionality was unavailable, so good luck trying to get people to do more than just click in your applications. So where should the logic, business logic in particular, run exactly? In your business services, of course!

Never heard of business services? More than likely you've never heard of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) then. You may have heard that it was this bleeding edge thing that some companies were doing or, perhaps you heard earlier this year that it was "dead". Hopefully you're not one of those people and instead already started on your SOA initiative. Ideally, you started on your initiative a couple of years ago and already have business services running within your enterprise being leveraged (read reused, one of the many benefits of a SOA) by many of your client applications. If that's you, you're in luck – your business logic is already separated from the data tier and you can easily build the mobile front end interfaces that your employees/clients are asking for. If you're not, let your SOA journey be a good one!

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