SOA: Some Assembly Required

Summary form only given. The ability of an organization to reinvent itself, then build and execute a new business process or business model, has improved little over the last thirty years. More and more, the business environment (mergers, acquisitions, new partnerships, spin-offs) is changing faster than enterprise architectures can respond. Architects confront having to embrace rapid change in enterprise information systems across multiple internal legacy applications as well as the external systems of key trading partners. COTS vendors are responding by inverting their delivery model. Enterprise-class systems that provide comprehensive business process functionality with integration at the fringe are now being delivered piecemeal in the form of thousands of services that inherently embody integration. This new architectural style delivers immense flexibility and agility but there are challenges in assembling robust, scalable and reliable enterprise solutions