As businesses are pressed to integrate increasingly diverse and complex application environments, services-oriented architectures will play an important role in presenting a unified face to users. The good news: An SOA plan can be defined and sold to management in a number of ways, as long as it removes redundancy and is written with security in mind. That was the consensus of several IT executives Tuesday at InformationWeek's Spring Conference in Amelia Island, Fla. "Every company has to define what SOA means to them," said Patrick Hale, director of technology implementation and consulting for health insurance provider Highmark Inc. One of the key criteria of Highmark's year-old SOA strategy is that it makes use of Web services to connect applications across multiple types of computing platforms...
