At Edgewater Technology, our team of industry and technical consultants works closely with our clients to prove how rapidly they can move from evaluating the potential of business process transformation to realizing business value through process improvements, cost reduction and revenue growth.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of principles and guidelines that inform the planning of enterprise architectures and the design, development, and integration of enterprise software. In an SOA, common business operations are exposed as services that are consumed by other systems and aggregated into new applications. The services may be within the company or provided by business partners. Conversely, the services of the company may be consumed by clients or business partners.
The guiding principle of an SOA is the encapsulation of business functionality as a component along with the exposure of that component as a service that can be accessed by any consumer. While components, services, and most of the underlying technologies are not new, the application to enterprise architecture as embodied in SOA is new. A critical component of SOA is the use of standards-based technologies. By forsaking proprietary protocols, data formats, and programming interfaces, components running on heterogeneous platforms can interact with one another. By maintaining a simple binding and protocol, services can easily be wired together.
A company begins adoption of an SOA by partitioning its business functionality, as manifested in its technical assets, into discrete, reusable components. As the technical infrastructure is split and repackaged into an SOA, a company can realize a number of benefits:
- More flexible and responsive IT infrastructure
- Faster adaptation to changing markets
- Reduction of spiraling IT integration costs
By its nature, an SOA can be adopted by a company in an incremental manner. In doing so, a company can quickly enjoy the benefits shortly after the process begins rather than wait until the adoption is complete.
Through careful analysis of the business, a company can determine how best to partition its processes so that they are exposed as services in an SOA. With a thorough assessment of their system portfolio, a company can make informed decisions on the best approach for an SOA roadmap, which platforms to keep, which to replace. Appreciating the complexity facing companies, Edgewater has put in place offerings to assist companies in this process. Edgewater has solutions that:
- Assess the current readiness of the staff, technology, and process in the enterprise for SOA adoption
- Strategically plan for SOA through development of a roadmap
- Develop an Enterprise Architecture that incorporates SOA principles
- SOA-enable existing systems or develop new systems based on SOA principles
Let Edgewater ’s team of industry and technical consultants assist you in implementing an SOA in your organization.