Enabling Agile and Intelligent Businesses

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In contrast to conventional integration technologies and approaches, integration projects implemented as SOA orchestrations, using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), have yielded significantly shorter change cycles. The SOA services layer has often proven useful in decoupling a unified process from multiple back-end systems and providing the illusion of a
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single process across multiple siloed business units. Additionally, this services layer has been used to insulate or future-proof front-end processes and systems from back-end infrastructures by serving as a stop-gap until the back-end systems are re-architected. With SOA based Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), businesses are able to reduce maintenance cycles from months to weeks, and reduce up to 70% of their IT expenditure on software maintenance. On one hand SOA allows IT organizations to break free from the shackles of traditional, proprietary, integration broker technologies by advocating a common, interoperable, and open standards-based approach to integration. On the other hand SOA based integration has relied on a broad array of technologies such as BPEL engines for process orchestration, ESBs for service mediation, etc. that have disparate products with independent development environments. This has left enterprises with the challenge of mastering multiple products in their already heterogeneous IT environments. Besides, the modular nature of services and processes in the world of SOA has resulted into service and process proliferation resulting into high level of redundancy. Oracle SOA Suite 11g overcomes this paradox by offering a unified process platform for human-centric, document-centric and system-centric workflows. Its unified composite application designer, which is based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard, provides rich, graphical drag-n-drop capability enhancing developer productivity; the comprehensive governance tools that promote service discovery and re-use reduce redundancy.
The Apollo Group is a leading provider of higher education programs for working adults in the United States. Apollo Group had a highly manual way of determining student eligibility for funds. With the help of E2E Consulting, Apollo automated additional fund processing for 120,000 students. To maximize its existing IT investments, the Apollo group leveraged Oracle's SOA platform to integrate PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite. Furthermore, Oracle Rules Engine was used to provide a configuration-driven, agile mechanism to evaluate student eligibility, calculate awards, and route exceptions. With the Oracle SOA platform, Apollo was able to certify more than 50,000 students, eligible for financial assistance, and achieve a 600% ROI over a 4 month period.
Oracle SOA Suite 11g offers a Unique Design Advantage for cost-effective SOA through 1. "Hot-pluggability" with existing middleware and application investments, standards based interoperability and scalability on low-cost commodity hardware 2. Unified Platform of the Complete, Integrated and Best-of-Breed offering that leads to higher developer productivity, re-use focused, composite application development, and faster implementation lifecycle
Even though SOA has gained widespread acceptance, transitioning to SOA requires prudent and careful planning. If SOA artifacts are left unchecked, over a period of time, the inventory of
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these SOA artifacts can become unmanageable resulting in diminished re-use of services and brittle business processes thereby negating the value of embracing SOA in the first place. Effective SOA governance provides you with visibility into, and oversight of, the relationships and interdependencies that connect services to other elements of SOA across the organization. Oracle SOA 11g offers a comprehensive end-to-end governance platform providing visibility encompassing people, process, and tec... [download for more]