There are several new and evolving enterprise integration and Web technologies that are likely to have a profound effect on the business intelligence (BI) marketplace. This month I want to discuss two of the more important ones: service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise service bus (ESB).
Service-Oriented Architecture
A service-oriented architecture consists of a set of components that enable distributed resources (applications, database systems, etc.) to interact with each other in support of business processing. Organizations have been doing distributed business processing for many years, and an SOA is simply a way of formalizing this processing.
