SOA and VeN4 ServiceWare™

What is SOA?

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) connects business services, IT processes, and innovative technologies into a dynamic and distributed environment. SOA enables the Information Technology agility to the ever evolving business environment. Breaking down siloed IT applications into SOA enabled business services is becoming more and more complex and consumes high volume of human resources within enterprise IT organizations. It takes effective SOA automation to mitigate the risks in this high cost complexity, discover the many software components of siloed applications, assign business context to each software component and enable organizations with a way to deliver business services faster.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) expresses a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. In an SOA environment, resources on a network are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.

A service-oriented architecture is not tied to a specific technology. It may be implemented using a wide range of technologies, including RPC, DCOM, CORBA or Web Services. SOA can be implemented without any of these protocols, and might use a file system mechanism to communicate data conforming to a defined interface specification between processes conforming to the SOA concept.

The key is independent services with defined interfaces that can be called to perform their tasks in a standard way, without the service having pre-knowledge of the calling application, and without the application having or needing knowledge of how the service actually performs its tasks, but only using its published contract.

SOA can also be regarded as a style of information systems architecture that enables the creation of applications that are built by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services. These services, inter-operate based on a formal definition (or contract, e.g., WSDL) that is independent of the underlying platform and programming language. The interface definition hides the implementation of the language-specific service. SOA based systems can therefore be independent of development technologies and platforms (such as Java, .NET etc). For example, services written in C# running on .Net platforms and services written in Java running on Java EE platforms, can both be consumed by a common composite application. In addition, applications running on either platform can consume services running on the other as Web services, which facilitates the reuse concept.

SOA can support integration and consolidation activities within complex enterprise systems, but SOA does not specify a methodology or framework for documenting capabilities or services.

High-level languages such as BPEL and specifications such as WS-Coordination extend the service concept further by providing a method of defining and supporting orchestration of fine grained services into coarser grained business services, which in turn can be incorporated into workflows and business processes implemented in composite applications or portals.

The SOA paradigm enables a higher level of application development by focusing on business processes, using standard interfaces and helping camouflage the basic technical complexity of the IT.