For Dummies Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), 2nd Edition 978-0-470-37684-3 User Manual

In This Chapter

▶ 

Finding out why you should care about SOA

▶ 

Liberating business from the constraints (and tyranny) of technology

▶ 

Illustrating the need for SOA

▶ 

Saving bundles by using what you have

▶ 

Expanding your SOA to customers, partners, and suppliers

▶ 

Focusing on function

S

ervice oriented architecture (SOA) is a hot topic being bandied about by 
IT vendors across the globe. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Software AG, Oracle, 

SAP, and Microsoft (just to drop a few names) are all singing from the SOA 
songbook, and hundreds of vendors are adding their tunes as we speak.

“What’s SOA?” you ask. We suspect that you’ve already skimmed a dozen 
articles and read (or deleted) hundreds of e-mails from vendors pushing SOA, 
but the answers you’ve gotten so far have been, well, vague and inadequate.

The short answer is that SOA is a business approach to building IT systems 
that allows businesses to

 ✓ 

Leverage existing assets

 ✓ 

Create new ones

 ✓ 

Easily enable the inevitable changes required to support the business

For you impatient readers out there, we expand on this short answer in 
Chapter 5. However, right now, we think the more important question is, “Why 
should I care about SOA?” In this chapter, we try to answer this question.

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