Many companies set out with SOA to achieve an integration goal or streamline an application or process -- and wind up far more than they originally expected. As companies move further along the spectrum of SOA deployment, BEA engineering vice president Charles Stack says companies are discovering to their delight and surprise that the changes SOA brings are more fundamental than originally expected.
As part of our series of podcasts with industry leaders that we launched in conjunction with InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum (held May 22-23 in New York), I had the chance to speak with Charles. (Link to the podcast here from InfoWorld.)
"Businesses are finding that what they intended the services to be used for only scratches the surface of what they actually could be used for," Charles said. Deep organizational changes are required as a part of the implementation, but these changes present companies with new business opportunities -– in part, as a result of the deconstruction of their former business capabilities.
For example, Charles explained, as the number of companies' services increases, there are more opportunities to "make them available to a broader community -- whether it's internal to your enterprise or even external to partners." Charles talked about the rise of "unintended uses or serendipity" that accompany a growing service repository. "Services are being consumed by others within the organization in ways and for reasons that were maybe never considered."
(Click here at the InfoWorld site to hear the entire 12-minute podcast.)
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