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Today, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are being heralded by industry analysts and software vendors as the only viable way to overcome the complexities involved in creating agile business systems. These software structures offer great promise for accelerating deployment of new applications and capabilities, streamlining business-critical processes, reducing costs, and enabling organizations to increase their return on investment from an accumulation of diverse systems and communication technologies.
To better understand SOAs and how they can be effectively employed, it helps to understand the principles on which they are designed. It also helps to become acquainted with tools that are helping enable application developers and integrators to quickly and cost-effectively make SOAs a reality within their specific organizations. This paper will examine the basic premises underlying SOAs and describe how universal technology and service adapters, such as those from iWay Software, can help organizations realize the benefits of SOAs.
Characteristics of Service-Oriented Architectures
Today's businesses depend on electronic processes at every level. An organization's ability to stay competitive relies heavily on being able to adapt its electronic processes in support of initiatives designed to improve productivity, reduce costs, deliver higher-quality information, and accelerate routine tasks. However, adapting these business-critical electronic processes requires evolving the systems they run on - quickly and cost-effectively. If only it were so easy.
Organizations adopt new technologies over time, and many enterprises own systems and software decades old, as well as the latest technologies. The old systems typically run some of the enterprise's most critical processes - which is why they haven't disturbed them. The new technologies are purchased to provide leading-edge capabilities. The result is often an incredibly complex environment composed of incompatible and proprietary information technology assets that were never designed to aggregate data or enable collaboration. These include:
-Legacy applications - a wide range of them, written in a variety of procedural languages that typically do not have well-defined interfaces for collaboration with other applications
-Object-oriented applications - many different applications developed as components for other applications, such as Enterprise JavaBeans?, COM, or CORBA objects
-Transaction systems - custom-developed applications that run under the control of transaction processing monitors such as customer information control system (CICS), IMS Transaction Manager (IMS/TM), BEA Tuxedo, and other software; and whose individual transactions are well suited to incorporation into collaborative business processes
-Packaged application systems - vendor-supplied, proprietary systems with well-defined, often completely proprietary, collaborative interfaces
-Databases and files - vendor-supplied, proprietary relational database management systems (RDBMSs), legacy database management systems (DBMSs), and file systems with varying degrees of standard and proprietary interfaces
-Communication transports and message formats - industry-standard transports such as hypertext transport protocol (HTTP), file transfer protocol (FTP), and simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP); vendor-supplied proprietary messaging and queuing systems from companies such as IBM and TIBCO; and a variety of formats for exchanging data between enterprises, such as electronic data interchange (EDI), Society for the Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and others
-Business exchanges - proprietary and standards-based public and private exchanges through which businesses collaborate with other businesses
-Application server platforms - application and integration servers that host all manner of applications and facilitate electronic collaboration within and between enterprises
Until recently, the largest enterprises have custom-developed new solutions or engaged system integration experts to connect existing information assets for supporting new initiatives. However, these efforts are costly, time-consuming, and sometimes impossible. Today's enterprises must be able to adapt quickly, using their existing information technologies and avoiding the cost of ripping, replacing, or rewriting every incompatible technology that impedes business agility. They must be able to build a foundation for new agile services by quickly exposing existing systems as fine-grained services - without having to write extensive code. These services must also be available across channels in multi-protocol environments in order to allow organizations to adapt existing applications and systems to accommodate new business processes.
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