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| Thought Paper |
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Evolving an Agile Enterprise: A Business Case for SOA Adoption |
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| Abstract |
Changing business scenarios, collapsing of traditional barriers and globalization are
creating new challenges for organizations. Further, mergers, acquisitions and changes
mandated by regulatory compliance are driving business change.
Organizations are extending their boundaries to include partners, suppliers and
customers. The current competitive environment also demands collaboration and trading
of information in real time to realize mutual and customer benefits. The business needs
are thus driving the technology adopted. Accordingly, software architectures have also
gone through a steady state of continual advancement. However, these advancements
have brought in increased levels of complexity.
This is because traditionally business applications were modeled according to the
individual line of business they were to support, resulting in compartmentalization and
duplication of application functionality and data, and proliferation of diverse platforms and
technologies within different divisions. The result was loss of uniformity, and increased
total cost of ownership of IT assets. In a poorly connected organization, lack of end-to-end
availability of current information hampers strategic decision-making and prevents the
organization from responding to customers and changing business needs in real-time.
Hence, in order to stay competitive, organizations need provisions for easy introduction of
new business processes, application resources and facilities for streamlining information
flow across the barriers laid down by various divisions within an organization and their IT
applications to be in an integration-ready format. In such a business environment,
organizations need an architecture that helps them adjust their business processes and
applications according to changing market requirements, which is provided by a service
oriented architecture (SOA).
This paper describes the role of SOA in the current business environment, the importance of standards and highlights some best practices for adoption of SOA.
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