Service Oriented Architecture

Introduction

The increasing pace of the evolution of business requirements, along with the need to maximize revenue and minimize costs, are leading corporate executives to align their IT organizations more closely with their business needs. The main goal of this alignment is to develop a more integrated business process that can be implemented by departments, business units, and business partner networks. In the past, this alignment process has been constrained because IT systems have not kept in step with business needs, and because the IT infrastructure has fundamental operational and developmental limitations. As a result, the integration challenge demands a technology that can successfully bring together the needs of business and IT into a workable solution that not only makes efficient and effective use of the IT infrastructure, but that is also flexible and adaptive enough to keep pace with continual changes in the organization’s business processes (Bieberstein, p. 1).

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the IT industry’s latest attempt to promote the concept of component reusability in the development, integration, deployment, and maintenance of enterprise applications (Bissonnette, n.p.). In today’s Internet-driven economy, companies are under relentless pressure to respond more quickly to the changing demands of their customers, partners, suppliers and employees. SOA promises to deliver the speed and adaptability companies need by making their applications more service driven. It achieves this by packaging application logic, or “services,” into