Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Solutions
The Revere Group can help move your IT infrastructure to an SOA-based enterprise.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is not a product or a technology, but an approach comprised of key tenants and guiding principles to which your enterprise, solution and application architecture must adhere. SOA is the blueprint that affects the way solutions are designed, architected and developed. It uses a service model to enable integration across diverse systems and dictate how various components communicate and interact with each other. Some key tenants of SOA are:
- Loosely coupled
- Contract-based interface
- Explicit boundaries
- Policy-based access
The Revere Group can help you ensure that your mission-critical business applications comply with SOA tenants to function as complete services.
Today’s businesses no longer just build an application – they create a service instead. For example, if you just purchased an accounting application, you’ll probably end up buying an accounting service. This service may include several sub-services, such as an accounting presentation service completely built on Microsoft’s next-generation Windows Presentation Foundation. Such services might facilitate a role-based user experience that allows data access via several devices such as desktops, smart phones and PDAs.
The benefits of today’s service-based solutions: availability, scalability, performance
Yesterday’s accounting application was more simplistic and less beneficial for businesses. In the old model, presentation services communicated with the next layer of services via message-based contracts, which then triggered contract-based data layer services that could access the information from any source in the enterprise. The new accounting system has several advantages when compared to the former. Each service is a module that encapsulates a functionality that can be implemented in any technology. The contract and policy are business-driven facades that abstract the technology in each layer. These contracts and services must live up to service-level expectations of availability, scalability and performance.
SOA governance and provisioning must be looked at closely when you implement services. The Revere Group can help you approach SOA at an enterprise, solution or application level. Depending on your business needs, we can provide you with the appropriate transition plan to methodically and strategically move your enterprise to a Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE), which provides global integration and orchestration of IT resources.