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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Until recently the idea of connecting information workers to business processes, service providers, and applications was too cumbersome and difficult to conceive. Only with the coming of ideas like SOA and Enterprise 2.0 are these goals realistically considered.

The main idea underlying SOA is that nothing in an enterprise IT environment should exist in isolation. The goal is to leverage existing data and application assets by provisioning them as shareable services, and when new functionality is built, create it as a service so that current and future applications can draw on its power.

Gartner Group has been a notable proponent of SOA as the overarching solution for business value for a while now and has stated that 80% of all development projects will use SOA as the basis for development by 2008.

One great advantage of SOA as compared with other models is that an organization can start small and grow organically. But the idealized endgame of SOA, is an entire infrastructure that functions as one giant, service-based application that can meet any business requirement.