In the not-too-distant future, an enterprise-wide, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) registry will be as common as today's systems management tools and integrated development environments. And applications with a top-line impact are going to be a driving force behind their adoption.
The appeal of SOA is pretty clear. Companies want to improve their agility. They want to respond quickly to changing markets and emerging opportunities, so they need a way to rapidly modify their business process to match their business goals. SOA encourages agility and responsiveness by using an orchestration or business process layer to easily combine and recombine discrete application services -- both data and code -- into composite applications.
As IT embraces SOA, demand will grow for an SOA registry that stores all the information about their SOA end points and governs their relationships and runtime interactions. SOA end points can be any data or code identified for reuse, including text files, database tables, CORBA programs, and COBOL transactions, as well as Web services. In time, companies are going to recognize their SOA end points as valuable corporate assets and demand the ability to control, approve, track, and govern them accordingly.
