The need to align business with the disparate components of the enterprise has recently become a top priority. The speed at which they require data and information exchange has become ever more important. Convergence of business practices and information technology is the ultimate goal. However, this goal is meaningless unless the technology is as adaptive as the environment it supports. Due to ever changing technology, customer demands, policies and governance, mergers and acquisitions, and economic pressures, business survivability requires an enterprise that is flexible, responsive, and above all, adaptive. Their survival may very well depend on its ability to accomplish this better and faster than its competitors. These are the founding reasons and principals behind the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) movement.

By now every CIO and CTO understands the proposed virtues of SOA, however, many are still on the sidelines. The reason is simple. They do not believe current solutions support the techno-marketing value propositions of SOA (IT agility, increased scalability and availability, reduced development time, support for multiple clients and platforms, lowered development costs, universality, standards-based, higher return on investment and others). The main culprit is the inability for complex enterprises to unify their existing components without the burden of heavy custom coding. To gain better acceptance, CIOs and CTOs must be convinced that SOA provides the necessary means to facilitate fast and effective implementation of new business practices into the infrastructure beyond the web services methodologies. This requires plug-and-play integration with minimal custom coding, real-time data and information exchange, service and target oriented implementation, and the ability to scale the enterprise up or down on demand and in line with changing business needs. This requires a solution that can provide most of the SOA benefits out of the box.

Efficient Integration is the Key to a Successful SOA

With companies expanding operations overseas, dealing with mergers and acquisitions, and business requirements for on-demand service implementations, it is nearly impossible for IT to keep pace with business needs without implementing the proper SOA solution. The IT department has become overwhelmed by the following tasks:

• Becoming more efficient: making existing software achieve higher productivity and improving how business transactions are handled. IT staff is expected to provide more with less despite shrinking budgets and expensive, never-ending custom coding.
• Improving Reaction Time: business must be sensitive about how well they provide quality customer service in a timely manner, ever mindful that customer satisfaction is intertwined with the company’s success. IT has the daunting responsibility of gathering and using information flowing throughout the enterprise and making it accessible to the individuals who need it to service customers.
• Enhancing Business Agility: consistently changing demands and business strategy require business agility or you risk being taken over by your competition. The need for business agility is no new paradigm, but with the acceleration of technology and business cycles, along with the expectation of IT to accommodate this faster pace, agility is becoming extremely important for businesses to remain viable.