Over the course of a year, we have been actively researching two interconnected IT architecture areas—integration and service-oriented architecture (SOA)—that are foundational to building a customer-adaptive architecture.
Not only are integration and SOA connected in the end game—delivering customer-adaptive IT solutions—but also in their IT instantiations. These connections are (minimally) three fold. First, SOA is commonly used to achieve business, application, and/or information integration. Business-oriented services are often employed to provide access to disparate resources, execute a business process, and/or disseminate information. Second, service orientation is starting to be applied to integration infrastructure, in the form of networked integration environments. These networked integration environments host collections of integration-oriented services (translation, transformation, orchestration, business process execution) that can be composed to resolve an integration scenario.
Third, integration and SOA share underlying technologies and application infrastructure. Examples of common technologies are XML, Web Services, messaging, and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Examples of common application infrastructure are application servers, Web Services platforms, messaging infrastructure and enterprise service buses (ESB).
