Advantages of SOA
October 12th, 2006
SOA helps businesses become more agile and responsive. How and why can it do that?
In today’s businesses too much time is used to maintain existing systems instead of building new systems that will help businesses to differentiate themselves. This is why one of the main cornerstones of SOA is business agility.
Business agility means that you want to reuse services and be flexible by having integration and interoperability between services. You also want these services to be loosely coupled to make sure you can exchange one service by another one without major changes to your IT systems.
Before SOA came to the scene we had the following ways to integrate applications in a three-tier architecture:
- Integration at the database layer through consolidation or by using a federated database
- Integration at the middle tier by writing custom code
- Integration at the glass with a portal
Where SOA changes the story is at the middleware layer. It allows us to replace custom code by processes that can be designed and refactored as required without writing code and it integrates message mediation into the infrastructure that is provided by the middleware layer to help different systems with varying message formats to be combined in one business process.
SOA is also part of a growing trend to help business units to be less reliant on IT departments to actually make changes to IT infrastructure when the business changes.
By allowing faster changes to existing systems and processes we’re reducing time used to maintain existing systems and free up IT people to focus on building new services that will help your business grow.