Why SOA?

TREND of service providing solution seems to be SOA. A lot of my IT friends question about it. They still do not realize why its simple concept could make it so strong. So, let’s see the answer to the questions.

SOA can make it easier and faster to build and deploy IT systems that directly serve the goals of a business. Contemporary business is completely reliant on its IT, and never have business and IT needed to be more aligned. The very survival of a business hinges on its ability to adapt its IT to meet ever-changing business challenges. SOA integrates business and IT into a framework that simultaneously leverages existing systems and enables business change. A SOA enables the business to keep its focus on business and allows IT to evolve and keep pace in a dynamically changing world.

We divide the world of SOA into the business services layer and the plumbing layer. Imagine a diagram that shows all the software that your organization runs. Divide it into the business services layer and into the plumbing layer. The business services layer contains your business logic. Your plumbing deals with your computing resources.

Business managers need not understand the intricacies of the plumbing layer and everything it contains. If you cover up the plumbing layer, you are left with a diagram that shows all the business services that software applications provide, both inside your organization and to others that interact (technologically speaking) from outside, like your customers, business partners, and suppliers. Looking at your organization’s software resources in this way, you may be able to think about ways to improve or better exploit the software assets you have.

Likewise, if you cover up all the business functionality in your SOA diagram, you are left with a set of plumbing services that your IT department is responsible for providing. We know that many of your “legacy” applications also have a good deal of plumbing in them, and the plumbing layer does not replace that. However, SOA enables an IT department to choose how it will evolve toward providing a “service oriented architecture” and in time may obviate a good deal of lousy plumbing.

SOA doesn’t guarantee a happier, healthier life, free from business concerns. However, movement toward SOA is usually a movement toward technical freedom and business flexibility and bodes well for the performance and profitability of an organization and for the sanity of the people managing the business.


A memory from "SOA for Dummies"