Enterprise SOA

What are the challenges for life cycle management in the context of ESA?

The obvious challenges are the transition from implementing, operating, and upgrading potentially dozens of applications to managing literally thousands of enterprise services and business objects, and then managing the succeeding transition of functionality from retired applications to a galaxy of independent business objects.

These services and objects will be used to produce landscapes running business processes across multiple systems (which must be added or retired with no visible impact to the landscape) that must be able to change at will according to the commands of business analysts. And there needs to be a set of standards inherent in the business process platform that allows ISVs and customers alike to design and implement new services which will automatically possess the characteristics for doing this. These same standards must also empower IT to automatically manage a larger landscape and enable hardware providers such as Cisco, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard to create systems that can assume at least the partial burden of such tasks as load balancing and reliable message delivery.

The final challenge is to close the gap between managing the purely technical performance of a service and managing it in light of its greater significance to business processes. With the number of services operating within the landscape poised to explode—don't forget that services may have multiple instantiations—it becomes ...