Understanding

SOA

Too often, organisations find themselves constrained and frustrated by their IT. The very technology that was sold to businesses to make them agile and responsive has begun to hold them back. How did it come to this?

The legacy of legacy systems

Over time, every large organisation accumulates a formidable IT legacy – mainframes, enterprise software and applications, some of them bespoke. Coding projects weave these components together, which allows data to be shared but also produces increasing complexity. Every new service adds to the tangle and creates more development work for future projects.

The result is that many businesses find themselves with a huge, inefficient IT estate, running multiple instances of the same applications and unable to respond speedily to business needs.

For businesses seeking to improve performance, launch new products and services, or respond to regulations and competitive pressures, SOA offers a way to reorganise their IT – moving from an IT-bound organisation to one whose technology is aligned with its business. In other words, SOA promises that it will drive innovation by simplifying process improvement and creation so that IT need never inhibit a business again.