Today most of the conversations surrounding service-oriented architectures
(SOAs) focus on flexibility and breaking down applications into services:
modular, reusable, componentized, with increased availability to the services
as well as increased management of them. However, with these conversations
comes the risk of getting sucked into a technology-centric vacuum in which
consideration for the real business problems that customers need to solve
might be neglected.
Undoubtedly there is a huge demand for the development and implementation of
SOAs. Gartner predicts that by 2008 more than 60 percent of organizations
will use SOA as a "guiding principal" when creating essential applications
and processes. With this in mind, and as the spotlight on SOA grows ever
brighter throughout the industry, companies in all sectors are posing the
question, "What are the key thing... (more)
SOA has been aggressively hyped by the IT industry as a technology that can -
and does - change the very nature of business. In recent times - as you well
know - the Internet was a similar technology - and as with the Internet, we
at IBM actually believe the hype to be true.
SOA has come on the scene in a big way in the past few years. But hype alone
isn't what's causing the huge stir. It's because those who've started using
SOA have discovered a huge benefit: flexibility. Let me put it this way:
Before SOA, to have flexibility, a company might have needed to deploy and
integrat... (more)