Depending on who you talk to, Service Orientation is either the biggest disruptive innovation in software, or merely a rerun of object-oriented programming and development. Whatever the perspective, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is heavily promoted as the way forward for businesses struggling to create more flexible and agile business processes while reducing the cost of application development and maintenance. Given all the “noise” in the market about SOA, let’s try and identify precisely what the main benefits provided by this approach are.
Due to the current focus on business flexibility, growth and innovation, the technology that most expedites these business goals is Service Oriented Architecture. Innovation requires change and SOA makes it easier for companies to change.
The Service Oriented Approach to linking software systems and applications is transforming the way many organisations share information. This approach improves existing methods of sharing data by providing a service layer between systems.
Service Oriented Architecture is a business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks or services. SOA essentially helps companies build composite applications, which are applications that draw upon functionality from multiple sources within and beyond the enterprise to support business processes. This approach allows organisations to more quickly react to changing market conditions and evolving business needs by using process models to design and build more flexible applications.
In essence, this application framework is comprised of engines and components. Engines are, at the lower level of the integration stack, providing brokering, integration, business process management, mission critical messaging and transformation capabilities. Components provide adapters or automated processes for which rules are embedded in the messages. Adapters are reusable pieces of code that implement Web services to achieve automated information access.
Let’s first discover a basic overview of the SOA concept and its associated business benefits ...
This second presentation, created by JISC, is describing extremely well the benefits of the Service Orientated Architecture and is demonstrating how an e-Framework for Education and Research is working to get the most out of this flexible approach.
The reality in enterprises is that IT infrastructures are heterogeneous across operating systems, applications and softwares. Enterprises should quickly respond to business changes with agility, leveraging existing investments in applications and infrastructures to address newer business requirements and supporting new channels of interactions with customers, partners and suppliers. SOA allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing ones in a granular fashion to address the new business requirements, thereby safeguarding existing IT infrastructure investments.
The overall objective of SOA is to streamline IT infrastructure. It is the foundation for higher-level capabilities such as business process management and business activity monitoring. It enables the assembly of composite applications that combine functionality from existing applications to more effectively address the ever-changing needs of business users.
Service Oriented Architecture can bring your business and IT in closer alignment, giving you new flexibility and agility to achieve an enduring impact on your business. It speeds business change, facilitates business connections & interoperability and enhances business control. SOA is not a technology, but a process for aligning business objectives, technology assets, and IT activities in a way that maximises incremental improvement, flexibility and reuse.
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