Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is about the enabling of services that will benefit more than one end system or department with an aim at decreasing overall operational costs.

SOA provides many more benefits including

• Higher Performance Development Teams
• More visibility of interfaces
• The ability to apply SLA's effectively and accurately
• Long term Operational cost savings

base2Services can help Chief Information Architects and Enterprise Architects plan & build the foundation for a successful SOA implementation as part of an overall strategy to achieve costs savings and higher performance.

Many organisations tend to loose focus of the SOA principles and build a solution that introduces a middleware that becomes the single point of failure and solutions that consist of point to point solutions. This is a common issue in most SOA projects and often leads to poor business experience of SOA.

SOA gotchas
SOA is a term that does get misused quite regularly and in particular is consistently used by vendors to sell organisations additional software. In most cases, this can cause an additional expensive overhead and worse still a single point of failure within your organisation.

SOA is about understanding the services your organisation can provide internally and externally. Were a service can become reusable is what you need to focus on. It is at this point you need to decide how accessible the service is and ensure that it does become accessible.

Point to Point solutions are often the biggest culprit of SOA misuse and it does start to become evident very early in any SOA implementation if this is to be the case. In particular, Point to Point solutions are often generated by short timeframes for delivery and a lack of understanding of the principles behind SOA.

base2Services helps ensure that these issues are made visible early on in a project or program and help in changing the plan of attack to meet the principles of SOA. We also provide a governance service on SOA that ensures that accountability is held on individuals to apply the SOA principles.