Impact of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) on Business and IT Operations
The impact of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) on business and IT operations varies from company to company. I think more and more companies are starting to view SOA as just another technology that they can incorporate in an existing or new system. One of the driving factors in using SOA is the reduction in maintenance costs and decrease in the time needed to bring products to market. The reductions in costs, and reduced turnaround time can be directly converted in to increased profitability due to less expenditures that are needed in order to maintain or create new systems.
My personal perspective on SOA is that it is great for what it is actually intended to do. SOA allows systems to be distributed across networks or even the world while ensuring enterprise processing consistency, data integrity and preventing code duplication. This being said a lot of preparation and work goes into properly designing and implementing an SOA especially if an enterprise wants to take full advantage of its benefits. Even though SOA has recently gotten a lot of hype about its benefits it does not a perfect fit for all situations. At the end of the day SOA is just another tool in my tool belt that I can pull from to create solutions that meet the business’s needs.
Based on current industry trends SOA appears to be a very solid technology to use moving forward, especially as more and more companies shift towards cloud based computing. It is important to remember that SOA is one of many technologies that can be used in creating business solutions and I think more time will be spent in the future evaluating if SOA is the right technology for a solution once the initial hype of SOA has calmed down.
