The need to align business with the disparate components of the enterprise has recently become a top priority. The speed at which they require data and information exchange has become ever more important. Convergence of business practices and information technology is the ultimate goal. However, this goal is meaningless unless the technology is as adaptive as the environment it supports. Due to ever changing technology, customer demands, policies and governance, mergers and acquisitions, and economic pressures, business survivability requires an enterprise that is flexible, responsive, and above all, adaptive. Their survival may very well depend on its ability to accomplish this better and faster than its competitors. These are the founding reasons and principals behind the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) movement.
By now every CIO and CTO understands the proposed virtues of SOA, however, many are still on the sidelines. The reason is simple. They do not believe current solutions support the techno-marketing value propositions of SOA (IT agility, increased scalability and availability, reduced development time, support for multiple clients and platforms, lowered development costs, universality, standards-based, higher return on investment and others). The main culprit is the inability for complex enterprises to unify their existing components without the burden of heavy custom coding. To gain better acceptance, CIOs and CTOs must be convinced that SOA provides the necessary means to facilitate fast and effective implementation of new business practices into the infrastructure beyond the web services methodologies. This requires plug-and-play integration with minimal custom coding, real-time data and information exchange, service and target oriented implementation, and the ability to scale the enterprise up or down on demand and in line with changing business needs. This requires a solution that can provide most of the SOA benefits out of the box.
