Microsoft Dynamics: Enabling Real-World SOA to Connect Your Business Vision with Software

Businesses need to connect processes, people, and information both within the organization and across organizational boundaries. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an emerging architectural style that helps meet these demands. Microsoft Dynamics has made investments in Web services and other SOA technologies across our product lines to help customers take a "Real-World" approach to SOA. This paper walksyou through the tools and technologies that enable service orientation. The purpose of this paper is to share with you the value of Real-World SOA and a few success stories from our customers who have taken on Real-World SOA projects to support their business vision

What is Real-World SOA?

Business solutions don't work in silos. The free flow of information within and across organizational boundaries coupled with the ability to adapt to changing business requirements, are key business needs. With organizations increasingly relying on their information technology (IT) infrastructure to help drive success, lack of integration among IT assets can make it difficult for IT to respond quickly and effectively to changing business needs. Such inflexibility can increase costs, decrease customer responsiveness, hinder compliance, impede information flow and decrease worker productivity. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables IT to meet the changing demands of businesses and to exploit new business opportunities. SOA is a design approach to organizing existing IT assets, so that the heterogeneous array of distributed, complex systems and applications can be transformed into a network of integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources.

SOA by itself is not sufficient to guarantee alignment of business and IT. SOA projects have limited success when they are driven from the bottom up by developers. Building SOA for the sake of SOA without reference to the business context is typically a project without organizing principles and guidance, and can result in a chaotic implementation with no business relevance. On the other hand, taking a top-down mega-approach to SOA can require enormous time investments, where by the time the project is complete, the solution no longer maps to business needs. In contrast, successful SOA initiatives are driven by strategic vision and business needs, and are realized through incremental, iterative SOA projects that are designed to deliver on business goals ? what we call a "Real-World" approach to leveraging service oriented architecture.

At the core of the 'Real-World' approach to SOA is our objective of connecting your business vision with software. The goal of any SOA project should not be to rip and replace the entire IT infrastructure. Real-World SOA is about taking a pragmatic approach to systems integration so customers can quickly deploy new solutions that involve sharing data and processes across multiple systems. Time-to-value is much more immediate because this approach to SOA does not require a complete overhaul of existing technologies and business processes. Just as the name implies ? through this approach we want to unlock the real-world value from existing assets wherever applicable. By exposing data and business processes as Web services, Microsoft Dynamics TM enables other systems to integrate seamlessly with its product lines. In addition, our 'integrated innovation' based on standards across the Microsoft technology platform can help further reduce time and money you need to spend on customizing the systems in order to support new opportunities. The result is a pragmatic approach to SOA that delivers real business value.

People are at the heart of any business. The degree to which your business solution architecture enables them to connect with the information they need and to the actions they must take is key to realizing greater success with the solution.

The Microsoft Dynamics research and development groups has conducted extensive research to create the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Model that helps us design software and services that supports the ways people interact in a business to achieve their goals. The processes and the process orchestration that are built into our software are based on this in-depth customer research. As a result, we help provide software that can fit with your systems and processes.

How Microsoft Dynamics enables Real-World SOA

This section takes you on a tour of how Microsoft Dynamics enables customers and partners in Real-World SOA projects. Ranging from simple integration requirements to business challenges that necessitate the orchestration of processes across organizational boundaries ultimately providing enhanced business insight, different business scenarios can serve as driving factors for customer's to take on Real-World SOA projects.