As with many new technological fashions, SOA promises to deliver better, faster, cheaper IT support than was possible before its arrival. However, all this hype seems to have resulted in a great deal of confusion around just what SOA is, and what it is not. In this article we take a look at SOA and the how the realtime enterprise is driving the migration to SOA.
It is important to try and understand the concept of the realtime enterprise. For instrumentation and control engineers the realtime world is in seconds or better. To a production manager the concept of realtime on say a batching plant may be at best the duration of the batch, production run or shift. To an operations manager dealing with a number of lines in a factory, realtime is probably moved back to a daily basis. The financial director is probably used to making decisions on a monthly or at best weekly basis given the accounting cycle.
