The faster companies can move as they conduct their business, the better their chances of enhancing their bottom lines. In the ebizQ webinar Accelerate Business Velocity with Service Oriented Architecture, part of the Oracle-sponsored series Increasing Business Velocity, Oracle's Product Director of Integration Server Technology, Ashish Mohindroo, explained how Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) can put organizations in the fast lane.

In the 90s, the mantra was speed how fast you could get things done, regardless of the impact on your overall business, Mohindroo recalled. In the 21st century, companies are realizing that moving fast is good, but moving fast in the right direction is even better.

In order to accelerate business velocity, companies need visibility into the business operation, to create the right business strategy, and the flexibility to change in near real-time and align operations to quickly execute the redefined strategy. This combination provides the company with the ability to gain a competitive edge.

Service Oriented Architectures provide a new approach to simplifying the IT infrastructure, Mohindroo said. They create a separation between the applications and the services they provide. These services can now be defined in a standards-based format, thus making them available to any system that needs access to them. Now, companies have to build connectivity to the system just once, and get the ability to reuse, orchestrate, and reassemble services over and over again, thus reducing the time and cost of creating applications, connecting systems, automating business processes, and breaking free of the cycle of constantly building and rebuilding the integration solution.

Mohindroo then outlined what's involved in going that route.

To enable an SOA, he stressed, the infrastructure needs to support a lifecycle of service development, composition, orchestration, discovery and access, provisioning, management, and federation of distributed services.

In order to deliver on the promise of Business Process Management (BPM), Mohindroo pointed out, the SOA infrastructure needs to provide a closed-loop model of defining and optimizing business processes. That gives companies the ability to change processes quickly, across multiple systems.