10 Things You Should Know About SOA

SOA is architecture SOA is a set of best practices. Its not technology. Its something you do, not something you buy.

SOA is not a panacea Its especially useful for reducing integration costs, increasing asset reuse, providing better business visibility, and most importantly, increasing business agility in an environment of heterogeneity. But if your problem is

Organizations should take an iterative approach to SOA One step at a time is best, and each iteration should show real business value. You dont have to have SOA everywhere to be successful with SOA.

The biggest challenges with SOA are organizational, cultural and political People are resistant to change, to sharing assets, and to funding each others projects. Compared to challenges like these, the technology is the easy part.

The greatest technical challenge with SOA is creating and maintaining the service abstraction Business services hide the complexity of the underlying IT from the business and the users, but that complexity remains—and SOA actually increases

The core infrastructure challenges with SOA are governance, quality, and management Without governance, SOA efforts are doomed to failure. Quality in the SOA context becomes an ongoing, full lifecycle battle. Management is the key to loose coupli

No two SOA implementations are alike Since SOA is a set of best practices, different organizations should leverage different practices to meet their particular needs. So the best way to do SOA is almost always it depends.**QT

Enterprises generally dont need much more middleware to implement SOA They usually have plenty already. SOA is more about leveraging the middleware assets you have than buying more.

The business side of the house doesnt want SOA They want solutions to business problems. The most successful SOA initiatives arent called SOA, but are rather closely tied to the problem they are looking to solve. SOA is more of the secret sauce

SOA is still immature Best practices are developing, standards are in the works, and theres still a lot of hype. Most SOA projects are still in the early stages. But that doesnt mean you cant get good value out of your SOA initiative. You just

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