Businesses of today are being forced to respond faster to competitive and customer challenges and are looking to IT to be a differentiator providing flexibility and speed as they address complex business forces. Forced to deliver more, faster, IT managers are looking at technology foundations that provide both agility and reduced cost, and Service-oriented architecture is touted as the silver bullet by industry analysts and the IT press. These days, it is difficult to attend an IT conference or pick up a magazine without hearing about the promise of SOA agility and reuse through standard Web service interfaces in a loosely coupled architecture.

Let us understand what is SOA and how it can be technology of future.

SOA-Based Integration

When talking about enterprise application integration (EAI) with IT organizations, we often heard a significant amount of dissatisfaction with traditional, proprietary, integration-broker technologies as well as point-to-point integrations. Many companies had trouble maintaining their integrations and grossly underestimated the time, money, and consulting help that would be required. They needed a better way of integrating applications—a way that will allow their internal, nonexpert, IT resources to maintain and evolve existing integrations rapidly and cost-effectively. Our findings show that, with standards-based integration, you now have the tools to create easy-to-maintain integrations. Integration projects implemented as SOA orchestrations using BPEL surprised IT managers with very rapid change cycles. Moreover, IT resources—who had no prior J2EE development experience—were comfortable maintaining the BPEL processes after getting up to speed in less than two weeks.

Modern, Composite Application Development

Custom-written applications are important to many companies, because they help implement competitive differentiation. However, many custom-written applications become legacy applications the day they are created, and evolving monolithic, tightly coupled application code that was written with integration as an afterthought is often nothing short of a nightmare. Traditional development approaches have created a “business/IT alignment gap.” SOA offers a better way of designing integrateable, reusable application assets, orchestrated from existing services rather than rebuilt from scratch that will close this gap.

We found that customers who apply business process management (BPM) best practices maximize the value of SOA. SOA technology coupled with an iterative development approach delivers high-quality business results in record development time. Unfortunately, we did experience a number of “bottom-up” SOA projects, which are rarely considered successful, because they do not drive enterprise wide adoption. As services are not offered at the right level of granularity for business analysts, this limits the potential for reuse. “Top-down” process mapping proved a successful remedy.

After having understood how SOA works and how it is better that other technologies, lets have a look at some of the key benefits of SOA technology.

Benefits:

Reduce development time and cost —SOA services are easily reused and can be rapidly assembled into new, composite applications

Lower maintenance costs — Reusable services reduce the number and internal complexity of IT services

Higher quality services — Increased service reuse creates higher-quality services through multiple testing cycles from different service consumers

Lower integration costs — Standardized services know how to work together, enabling disparate applications to quickly and easily connect

Reduce risk — Fewer, reusable services provide greater control over corporate and IT governance policies and reduce the overall compliance risk

Thus we can see that SOA is the future. Our technology partners Oracle, IBM and Sun have been doing lot of research over this technology.