Services Oriented Architecture

SOA is a blueprint or a framework of applications within an enterprise.

SOA mainly brings about business agility within the enterprise and maps IT agility to business agility. SOA is built on “business services” and thus the name Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA is useful for enterprises who typically find that IT is not flexible and agile enough with business demands. Generally, investment is need whenever there is a change in the business process happening; Enterprises also typically find that IT is not aligned well with business processes

SOA gives the answers to these problems. An SOA implementation will provide
-Provide true business agility
-Map business processes with IT
-Reduce further investments in IT
-Increase technology reuse
-Provide a more adaptable and faster changing environment that corresponds with business changes

SOA is a huge opportunity world wide. SOA opportunity exists in
>Being a BPM Studio / ESB / SOA Suite Vendor...There are different names for the tools with different functionality. An ESB is a lightweight, ubiquitous integration background through which software and component services flow (definition:gartner).

>Being a Services provider in SOA/BPM space (BPM:Business process management).

SOA market size (from various sources)
• It is anticipated that almost half of enterprises will adopt a SOA strategy by 2006.
• The business-management software market is one of the fastest growing and is estimated to top $1 billion dollars by 2008
• Zapthink Group - a market based on enterprise software, including applications, development tools and infrastructure software--will reach $98 billion by 2010, showing a compound annual growth rate of 7 percent for the rest of this decade.

small steps to SOA adoption for tech companies..
--Set up a SOA practice team with members having indepth Webservices experience
--Partner with known SOA Vendors - the shortest route to move into this market
--showcase your thought leadership via presentations, webinars, podcasts, whitepapers, articles, speakers etc
--Clearly outline your strategy to your customers for SOA adoption, of course work out the economics, benefits, sample proposals etc..

Known SOA/BPM workflow tools/ESB Vendors
-Feugo BPM (acquired by BEA)
-Oracle / IBM
-Tibco
-Webethods
-CapeClear
-SonicSoftware
-Jboss (open source)

Please do send in your suggestions / comments / changes -if there are errors) to me via a PM

Infomation is mostly compiled, partly authored.

Asif Ali
ThreeSixty Technologies Pvt Ltd
Chennai