SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Demystified

Core SOA

SOA emerged from a powerful concept: Build complex application solutions by combining services from a broad mix of enterprises. To offer a service to an end customer, you can identify, implement, and use specialized capabilities from multiple sources to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations.

As an example, consider a financial organization that offers consumer loans for automobile purchases. When the enterprise receives a loan request from a prospective customer, it can interact with other specialized service providers such as the prospect’s bank, credit rating bureaus, or law enforcement agencies, to assess creditworthiness. Each of these enterprises runs their own specialized IT systems based on different technology platforms, but they are able to respond to information requests.

The example above could also be an internal information exchange within an enterprise, which could require interfacing between a mixture of legacy and current IT systems. You could handle most of the information processing on legacy-based systems and provide internet-based, user-friendly interfaces to internal customers through a new application developed specifically to request information from the back-end legacy system for information:

What we discussed so far is the core idea behind SOA. However, present day SOA technology gained even greater popularity when it combined the inherently powerful idea of exchanging information between disparate systems with many other concepts that further extended synergies.

Business Process Management (BPM)

For businesses, technologies are just the means to achieve an end. What businesses care most about is facilitating and enhancing their core business processes. The BPM part of SOA refers primarily to methodologies that enable “composition” - to get multiple services to act together in a synchronized way to form a single cohesive business process.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

With many different services contributing towards the activities that form a single business process, it can be a challenge to isolate and understand the entire process in an aggregate form. The BAM software provides a holistic view of the component segments.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

The Enterprise Service Bus is a mechanism to deliver the services in an enterprise where the service provider and user may operate on diverse protocols, formats, platforms, etc.  The ESB essentially acts as a mediator to enable information exchange.

There are many technologies that can be used together or separately to make SOA approaches successful. A skilled service provider can offer the experience and tools needed to implement high-value SOA processes in your organization and help achieve your IT goals.