SOA in Practice

Chapter 1. Motivation

WE LIVE IN HARD TIMES. THE SOCIAL MARKET ECONOMY IS BEING REPLACED BY A GLOBAL MARKET economy, and the marketing guys rule the world. As a consequence, you have to be fast and flexible to survive. It’s a renaissance of Darwinism:

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

The key is flexibility. For all major companies and large distributed systems, information technology (IT) flexibility is paramount. In fact, IT has become a key business value enabler.

At the same time, processes and systems are also becoming more and more complex. We have left the stage where automation was primarily a matter of individual systems, and are fast moving toward a world where all those individual systems will become one distributed system. The challenge is maintainability.

It turns out that the old ways of dealing with the problems of scalability and distribution don’t work anymore. We can no longer harmonize or maintain control. Centralization, the precondition for harmonization and control, does not scale, and we have reached its limits. For this reason, we need a new approach—an approach that accepts heterogeneity and leads to decentralization.

In addition, we have to solve the problem of the business/IT gap. This gap is primarily one of semantics—business people and IT people appear to speak and think in entirely different languages. The new approach must bring business and IT much closer than ever ...