Five Ideas: SOA
Why service-oriented architecture may be key to surviving the economic crisis.
October 2008
“With today's tough economic climate every cost is being scrutinized, be it a business expense or an IT expense. Everything is going under the microscope. What's special about SOA is that it aligns business and IT initiatives, making it a lot easier to propose projects and get them approved. The reason SOA aligns business and IT so well is because it's a paradigm that helps maximize existing assets and helps you approve efficiency along the entire value chain... Bottom line: SOA is as much about business as it about technology”—Maneesh Joshi, a senior group manager, product marketing for SOA at Oracle
“SOA is a simple and common sense approach adopted from the way things work in our surroundings to the more complex, tightly coupled, and rigid world of software..SOA as such is not a product that can be bought, rather is an approach towards building modular software using service-oriented principles. There are tools that can be used to realize the service-oriented approach efficiently. Many companies provide tools for assisting enterprise software implementation based on services and service-oriented architecture approach. In case of Oracle, the components for SOA are bundled as SOA Suite which is a complete set of service infrastructure components for building, deploying, and managing SOAs.”—Peeyush Tugnawat, Senior Principal Consultant with BPM & SOA practice of Oracle Consulting
“So why should SOA be part of an upgrade? The answer is quite simple — SOA is a software architectural concept that defines the use of services to support business requirements. These self-describing, reusable building blocks can be leveraged to develop loosely coupled, standards-based customizations. So, instead of re-applying customizations using code and tools that are native to the application, you can introduce SOA-based components that are language, platform and application agnostic.”—OAUG board member Basheer Khan
“SOA the remedy for the hard economic times. Companies have to change their key process to continue to be successful. SOA helps them to automate, chance and integrate their processes."—Juergen Kress, Senior Manager SOA at Oracle EMEA
“Prioritize your SOA road map. Focus first on a small yet important process that is critical to your business or cash flows. Use SOA to fix this process that has high visibility and is infamous for its inefficiency...By showing savings and benefits on a visible project, you can catch management's attention and use it to make the case to grow your SOA initiative. It is extremely important to pick a process that is manageable and improves your chances of success. You are going to get one chance and you certainly do not want to bite off more than you can chew”—Maneesh Joshi, a senior group manager, product marketing for SOA at Oracle
