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SOA Is Looking A-OK

By Pam Baker

The clamor for convergence is reaching a deafening roar as IT departments seek new ways to make scarce budget dollars support broad and sweeping business changes. The more flexible and adaptable the technology, the better the play, the thinking goes. Better still: the technology becomes invisible, connecting multiple uses and applications while leaving the user's focus on the business at hand rather than on the interface commands.

Legacy and other systems intended to improve time-to-market or component re-use, such as CORBA and DCOM, were soon outpaced. "Previous strategies were very rigid and brittle," says Peter Kastner, research vice president of the Aberdeen Group of Boston, Mass. "Any small change could break things." In their place arose Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), an approach to designing business applications built around the concept of services.

What's So Different?
"Past integration strategies focused primarily on simplifying the effort required to make large applications interoperate," says Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research based in Cambridge, Mass. "SOA, on the other hand, is about creating or repackaging software components in a way that makes the components themselves easier to use by new or existing systems."

SOA is differentiated from previous technologies in two ways, says Fulton.  First, SOA designs around business process steps, achieving a more naturally reusable granularity of function. Second, the industry has learned a lot about the need to support the adoption of new approaches by also facing the challenges head-on. (article continues)

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