Growing an Agile Service-Oriented Architecture
Web Services are lowering the costs of integration in companies around the globe today. Even small, point-to-point integration projects achieve substantial, rapid ROI using a Web Services integration approach.
As companies become more Web Services savvy, the benefits of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) become apparent. SOAs provide a framework for flexible, low cost enterprise integration. They also lead to substantial business agility–a primary goal in today’s fast-paced business environments.
Much of the ROI derived from an SOA comes from the ability to reuse Services. To maximize the reusability of Services in an SOA, it is critical to separate the business functionality provided by those Services from the information related to the delivery of the Services, such as security, data transformation and service-level agreements. Such delivery criteria are best defined in a Web Services delivery contract. Such contracts can be dynamically configured in the abstraction layer that the SOA provides between the applications that provide and consume the Services.
Using delivery contracts simplifies the reuse of Web Services and enables companies to maximize the benefits of an enterprise SOA, including rapid, low cost integration and the business agility needed to meet new business challenges, now and in the future.