Why SOA Service Oriented Architecture?

Why SOA?

Most IT organizations today must justify their projects with an expected return on investment. IT now faces pressures on a number of fronts:

Requirements to be more responsive and flexible to shifting business needs
Challenges of handling often-incompatible, heterogeneous software systems
Demands to bring new business services to a broader array of consumers ranging from customers accessing services via web interfaces, to partners sharing information to improve working relationships and deliver increasing value to mutual customers, to companies sharing information with the supply chain to decrease manufacturing time and costs
Understandably, IT organizations are seeking solutions to help them meet these increasing demands in the most cost-effective way.

The value of SOA Service Oriented Architecture has perhaps been oversold as a methodology and has often been mistakenly promoted as a technology that will solve all of the problems discussed above. However, an SOA approach can in fact bring numerous benefits to an IT organization. Let's look at these potential benefits within three categories:

Standarized interfaces and data models: SOA Service Oriented Architecture can help reduce costs of building new functionality from heterogeneous software systems and incompatible data by providing standardized interfaces and data models.

Re-use: If done properly, these service definitions and data models enable the ability for re-use, thereby reducing the overall cost of application development projects built on these principles. This is especially true for ongoing maintenance and building new applications built by leveraging existing services.

Composability: SOA Service Oriented Architecture enables the idea of composability. This means that new services can be rapidly built from existing services. This ability makes IT organizations more agile than ever before, as they can then respond to continuously evolving business objectives. This may make it possible for you to leverage not only your own services, but also services from other organizations, from partners, or from suppliers with whom you contract to provide these services.