Extending the Benefits of SOA Beyond the Enterprise from Tibco Software Inc. UK Computing ITHound

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Extending the Benefits of SOA Beyond the Enterprise
by Tibco Software Inc. UK
Published:September 2006
Format: Portable Document Format (.pdf)( 214.6 KB )
Length: 9 pages
Overview

The SOA approach to building enterprise IT infrastructures has gained widespread acceptance within the IT community. Prior to SOA, enterprise application functionality was often delivered via separate, monolithic applications that could not communicate. Integrating these applications was a time-consuming, costly affair and generally resulted in custom solutions that were not reusable. With an SOA, however, application functionality is partitioned into reusable components called services that perform discrete
functions. These services can be combined to form composite applications that deliver higher order business functionality. The result is an IT infrastructure that allows for rapid deployment of functionality that is reusable, flexible and less costly to maintain.

To date, however, most SOA initiatives have been deployed “within the firewall,” that is, they have been used primarily to integrate applications within an enterprise. An even bigger opportunity, however, exists in applying the SOA approach beyond the enterprise to facilitate integration between a company and its partners and customers. In fact, many of the most commonly cited benefits of SOA—more effective integration with business partners, better supply chain collaboration, increased global sourcing and more effective use of external service providers — are business-to-business benefits. Clearly, realizing the full potential of an SOA approach involves extending its use beyond the firewall to facilitate the end-to-end automation of business processes throughout the entire ecosystem of partners and customers surrounding a company.