Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 1. SOA What?

In This Chapter

• Why you should care about SOA

• Liberating business from the constraints (and tyranny) of technology

• Illustrating the need for SOA

• Saving bundles by using what you have

• Expanding your SOA to customers, partners, and suppliers

• Focusing on function

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is the hottest topic being bandied about by IT vendors across the globe. IBM, HP, BEA, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft (just to drop a few names) are all singing from the SOA songbook, and hundreds of vendors are adding their tunes as we speak.

"What's SOA?" you ask. We suspect that you've already skimmed a dozen articles and recycled a tree's-worth of junk mail from vendors pushing SOA, but the answers you've gotten so far have been, well, vague and inadequate. The short answer is that SOA is a new approach to building IT systems that allows businesses to leverage existing assets and easily enable the inevitable changes required to support the business.

For you impatient readers out there, know that we expand on this short answer in Chapter 2. However, right now, we think the more important question is, "Why should I care about SOA?" We try to answer this question first.

The promise of service oriented architecture is to liberate business from the constraints of technology and unshackle technologists from the chains they themselves have forged. ("IT workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" as it were.) This has major implications both for the business ...