SOA FAQ

SOA FAQ

Q: How are SOA and BPM related to each other?

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) share common goal —increased enterprise agility. BPM creates a deep understanding of processes that, in turn, provide an important dimension for understanding what parts of the application portfolio should be engineered into SOA services.

Combining SOA and BPM projects results in increased benefits, which are achieved more quickly than when either is initiated alone. Business process semantics can be implemented by combining granular technical services into composite services. The sequencing of business tasks or activities creates context for the work. As the business semantics change, or the process sequence changes, services can be recombined, re-sequenced or even substituted to produce realignment with the new context of process or work. BPM methods highlight common, shared requirements for business services and, can help SOA projects importance as contributing to improved business performance and innovation by addressing constantly changing business needs. Similarly, for BPM projects SOA should be promoted as the technological enablement of BPM.

Q: What is Service Orientation?

Service orientation is a means for integrating across diverse systems. Each IT resource, whether an application, system or trading partner, can be described and accessed as a service. These capabilities are available through service interfaces.

Service orientation uses standards based protocols and conventional interfaces—usually Web services—to facilitate access to business logic and information among diverse services. Specifically, SOA allows the underlying service capabilities and interfaces to be composed into processes. Each process is itself a service, one that now offers up a new, aggregated capability. Because each new process is exposed through a standardized interface, the underlying implementation of the individual service providers is free to change without impacting how the service is consumed.

Q: What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

SOA is a standards-based design approach to creating an integrated IT infrastructure capable of rapidly responding to changing business needs. SOA provides the principles and guidance to transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and inflexible IT resources into integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources that can be changed and composed to more directly support business goals.

Q: What business value does SOA provide?

SOA enables businesses to realize greater agility in their business practices, delivering value across both application and IT infrastructure layers. From an application perspective, SOA enables the development of a new generation of dynamic or composite applications. These applications enable end-users to access information and processes across functional boundaries, and to consume them in a number of convenient ways, including through Web, rich client and mobile presentation layers. From an infrastructure perspective, SOA enables IT to simplify application and system integration, to recombine and reuse application functionality and to organize development work into a unified and consistent design framework. The combined business value of the SOA approach helps to lower IT costs; provides better, more rapidly accessible business information, and enables the organization to identify and respond to workflow problems more efficiently.

Q: What business problems does SOA solve?

SOA enables businesses to develop a new generation of dynamic applications that address a number of top-level business concerns that are central to growth and competitiveness. SOA solutions promote:

• Stronger connections with customers and suppliers. By making available dynamic applications and business services to external customers and suppliers, not only is richer collaboration possible, but customer and partner satisfaction is increased. SOA unlocks critical supply and demand chain processes—such as outsourcing of specific business tasks—from the constraints of underlying IT architectures, thereby enabling better alignment of processes with organizational strategy.

• Enhanced business decision making. By aggregating access to business services and information into a set of dynamic, composite business applications, decision makers gain more accurate and more comprehensive information, and gain the flexibility to access that information in the form and presentation factor (Web, rich client, mobile device) that meets their needs.

• Greater employee productivity. By providing streamlined access to systems and information and enabling business process improvement, businesses can drive greater employee productivity. Employees can focus their energies on addressing the important, value-added processes and on collaborative, semi-structured activities, rather than having to conform to the limitations and restrictions of the underlying IT systems.

Q: Will SOA enable alignment of business and IT?

SOA by itself is not sufficient to guarantee alignment of business and IT. In fact, many organizations that have attempted to roll out SOA infrastructure through a top-down approach have found that that by the time the infrastructure was delivered, it was out of sync with the needs of the business. In contrast, those customers that have driven successful alignment have started with a clear understanding of their business vision, have well-defined business initiatives and outcomes, and have chosen to incrementally deliver those "slices" of their SOA infrastructure that deliver upon these objectives. Microsoft has long advocated this approach—what we call our "real world" approach to leveraging service oriented architectures. This real world approach is focused on rapid time-to-value, and on delivering business results through iterative, incremental steps that are more closely aligned with changing business conditions. This helps enable a much tighter degree of alignment between business and IT.

Q: Is SOA a product?

No. SOA is not a product, but an architecture approach and set of patterns for implementing agile, loosely coupled dynamic applications.

There are numerous misconceptions about what SOA is—that it is a product that can be purchased (it is not; it is a design philosophy that informs how the solution should be built); that the goal is to build a SOA (it is not; SOA is a means to an end); or that

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