Chapter 1
Getting to Know SOA
In This Chapter
Finding out 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 a hot topic being bandied about by IT vendors across the globe. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Software AG, 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 read (or deleted) hundreds of e-mails 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 business approach to building IT systems that allows businesses to
Leverage existing assets
Create new ones
Easily enable the inevitable changes required to support the business
For you impatient readers out there, we expand on this short answer in Chapter 5. However, right now, we think the more important question is, “Why should I care about SOA?” In this chapter, we try to answer this question.
The promise of service oriented architecture is to liberate business from the constraints of technology, unshackling technologists and business leaders from the chains they themselves have forged. (“IT workers of the world, unite! You have nothing ...
