Credit Crunch, Security Compliance or Service Oriented Architecture

Before we examine why you should be looking at SOA, let’s back track and cover the basics of SOA.  An SOA infrastructure is an ecosystem of products that work together to enable service endpoints to communicate in a managed and coordinated way.  For example:

- An ecosystem of products could include; order management, inventory control, warehouse management, invoicing, and delivery management.

- An example of a set of service endpoints could include a web-interface that allows customers to order products, check for availability, check their credit limit and check for when the product will be delivered.

The SOA toolset would allow each of these applications to communicate so that once a product has been ordered, it would then be removed from inventory, if stocks reached a certain level, then further supplies would be ordered and organised.

Once the order is confirmed by the customer pressing the confirm button on a web-interface, it would be automatically scheduled for delivery and a message sent to the shipping department for when the goods are to leave and arrive.

In addition an invoice could automatically be sent to the customer via email.  All of this without any intervention from an operator to produce invoices, check for stock, check for delivery times or re-order further stock.

SOA architecture will typically include:

- A toolset to handle messaging and communication between the applications in the ecosystem
- A toolset to handle business process management that will sort out the workflow and sort out what each application is to do next.