What is SOA?
In the drive for greater success for business IT is finally starting to make the difference it has always promised. The reason is the move to the Service Orientated approach to the architecture that supports the business and provides the agility needed in today's market places.
Service Orientated Architecture, for a number of years, has been linked with building solutions with web services but that is extremely misleading. SOA is a blue print for how solutions, business processes and applications are delivered not simply the technology or 'building materials'.
All businesses have two aspects that define them: the core processes, applications and principles that underpin the business that rarely change and the things that change frequently such as prices, stock lists, customer experience and products. What is clear is that changes in the frequently changing level should not impact at the core level.
In a nut shell SOA provides us with the approach and blueprints to meet this goal. In essence a business can appear and in fact be very agile without having to rebuild it's core to achieve it.
SOA is the practice of grouping core business functions into independent services that don’t change frequently. These services can then be used or composed together to deliver solutions, services and applications the business requires. The win for business is these solutions and applications can be changed as the market or business dictates providing the agile edge that delivers success.