What is SOA?

As many technologies in past, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the most recent buzzword in the IT world. From past couple of years, I have been working on SOA tools and concepts. I have been trying to figure out why companies (vendors and clients) are making such huge investments in this initiative? What is the niche that is attracting them ? On my way, I figured out that SOA has the potential to revolutionize the relevance of IT in business decisions and thus, make a direct and tangible impact on the Share Holder's wealth.

Definition: SOA is an architectural style for implementing and using the business process as services. The services are functional building blocks accessible over standard protocols that are independent from the platforms and programming language.

Strategic Benefits:

1. Increased Intrinsic Interoperability
2. Increased Confederation
3. Increased Vendor Diversification Options
4. Increased Business and Technology Domain Alignment
5. Increased ROI
6. Increased Organizational Agility
7. Reduced IT Burden

Technological Benefits:

1. Loosely Coupled Systems
2. Flexibile Systems
3. Agile Systems
4. Business Responsive Systems
5. Scalable Systems

I shall explain each of some of these benefits in the next article.