Credit Crunch, Security Compliance or Service Oriented Architecture

For example when an order is received, it needs to be invoiced and then sent to Warehousing Application to arrange delivery, the Warehousing Application would automatically allocate a carrier.

In addition the Warehousing or Order Management Applications would also talk to the Inventory Control Application to remove the item from stock.  The Inventory Control Application would also automatically order further product once supplies have reached a specified limit.

- A toolset to handle business rules

For example, some business rules might include give a 10% discount when a hundred items are ordered, charge extra for delivery on Sundays and bank holidays, give a complimentary ticket when a certain promotional code is entered.

- A toolset to handle data to ensure each application can understand the data from a variety of data sources and to aggregate and produce reports that you could not produce by using one application on its own.

Without SOA, substantial programming would be involved for example to:

- Produce a consistent method for each of these applications to communicate with every other application in the ecosystem in order to share their data.

- Produce an interface that co-ordinates and manages the outputs (or service endpoints) produced by the integration of the applications.

The SOA infrastructure includes several product categories that allow you to integrate these products and produced the desired outputs quickly and consistently without the need for substantial programmer intervention. 

You can read up more about SOA in the special report here.

In this article we will focus on Data Services as they can be considered the first step in an SOA initiative.