Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architectures are what's hot in IT these days. After years of investment by all key technology platform players including IBM, Sun, Microsoft and many others, SOA infrastructure is now starting to power the enterprise.

SOA allows companies to:

• Integrate systems in a uniform, extensible way
• Centralize communications and monitoring for better reliability
• Make "Web 2.0" paradigms possible
• Unify data and transactions across divisions of companies that have several sets of core systems and infrastructure that are maintained by heterogeneous teams in different locations
• Provide better information and analytics at the global level

Oshyn is currently a very successful implementer of SOA, with specific knowledge of the packaged options in the market place and the benefits and issues with each.

Oshyn is vendor neutral meaning that we do not have a pre-defined set of vendors that we are biased to because of an existing relationship. We also do not revenue-share or make money from selling licenses of any product we recommend to a client.

Our approach to SOA can be summarized as follows:

1. Start with an achievable portion of your total integration problem to show quick ROI to your business
2. At the beginning, don't focus on technology, focus on value and benefits to the business in terms of agility, cost reduction, flexibility and maintenance
3. Educate your organization on what SOA is and what it is not (i.e. SOA is not BPM or BPR but can be and most often is related)
4. Decide up front your motivations for doing an SOA project as that will dramatically impact the path your project will take:
   1. Do you want to expose services to partners, vendors or customers?
   2. Do you want to create a platform and patterns for your current and future integrations?
   3. Are you trying to solve a technical integration problem or a business process problem?
5. Don't deviate from standards as that reduces your interoperability; one of the key benefits and drivers for SOA
6. Wrap existing web services to adhere to standards instead of re-writing wherever possible
7. Look for industry standard schemas to leverage
8. Use message event based, asynchronous communication as much as possible. Normally, this requires a significant mindset shift and can impact business processes.
9. Decouple your XSD/DTD from your WSDL for maximum reusability