Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services are being critically
considered by most organizations today in some form or another. The adoption
of SOA and Web services has gained momentum after the standardization of
various aspects such as security, business process coordination, transaction
management, communication protocol, registration and discovery, etc. However,
one notable and practical aspect of designing, implementing, and managing
services has not been tackled at a specification level. This aspect is
related to the management of change and interface versions.
Real-world business and infrastructure services will be dynamic and subject
to change due to various issues that may range from a business rules change
to service-level improvement. It is a challenging problem to manage services
whose interfaces are changing, especially in the situation where t... (more)
The concept of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) can be illustrated by
leveraging commonly understood concepts of object-oriented programming.
Services comply with many of the standard principles that form the bedrock of
object-oriented programming. However, SOA provides benefits at a much higher
level of the IT value chain as discussed below.
In the object-oriented world, a class is the core concept that represents an
abstraction of a real-world entity or concept with an object being a physical
implementation of that class. Let us revisit some of the benefits that may be
avai... (more)
SOA initiatives have gathered momentum in the past year with more enterprises
either implementing SOA or considering implementing in the near future. The
implementations we studied reveal that one of the critical challenges in SOA
is designing an effective governance mechanism. A good understanding of
governance concepts is essential to implementing and operating a successful
SOA. Reliable governance for SOA leads to a manifold increase in an
enterprise's ability to achieve the goal of business agility through SOA.
Defining IT Governance
The IT Governance Institute defines IT gove... (more)
Agile IT systems are systems that are malleable enough to address business
uncertainties. Such systems can effectively respond to internal and external
stimuli in a very short period of time. Flexible IT systems imply that the IT
architecture underlying them is itself flexible and lends itself to
incorporating changes in a dynamic fashion. Architectural approaches such as
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are transforming the way IT systems are
designed by bringing in a high degree of reuse and loose coupling of
applications.
IT architectures include the technology, strategies... (more)
Legacy systems are a core asset at many organizations. These legacy systems
have been around for decades and have a very critical impact on day to day
business processes. However, owing to a variety of reasons, these legacy
systems have high TCO and represent a bottleneck towards the emergence of an
agile IT portfolio. In this article we'll focus on a variety of options that
may be available for the seamless integration of legacy systems with an
enterprise IT portfolio. We converge on legacy enablement using Web services
as a viable option towards achieving an integrated, agile a... (more)
Dr. Sriram Anand is a principal researcher at Infosys Technologies, Bangalore. Prior to joining Infosys he worked in IT consulting as well as product engineering in the US for over 12 years. His interests include enterprise architecture, service-oriented architecture, and legacy integration and software engineering methodologies. Dr. Anand is experienced in designing enterprise architectural strategy for leading U.S. companies in the financial services, retail, and pharmaceutical domains. He holds a Bachelor?s degree from IIT-Madras with a PhD from SUNY-Buffalo, USA.
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
