This month's column was written by Shashank Tanksali, the SOA practice manager at Wipro Technologies.
Ask 10 people in a room what they think a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
is and you will in all probability get 10 very different answers. Like many of
its technology predecessors, SOA has had more than its fair share of confusion.
Many IT managers seem to believe that they understand service-oriented
architectures, while others confess to their ignorance of SOA. However, even
those IT managers who seem to understand the basics of SOA still have very
different opinions of what comprises a service-oriented architecture. The root
cause for the confusion seems to revolve around the extremely ambiguous term
"service," which has different preconceptions in the minds of IT managers. What
comprises a service is not universally agreed upon. There is a school of thought
that believes that for an architecture to be considered a service-oriented
architecture, all services need to be Web services. While Web services are
definitely the predominant enablers for a service-oriented architecture, it is
possible to achieve a service-oriented architecture without using Web
services.
The question arises as to what can be considered a service and what can be
considered an SOA.
