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The ultimate implementation of flexibility for today’s On Demand Business is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - an IT architectural style that allows you to integrate your business through the linking of services. It’s about enabling business flexibility through the integration of systems, data, applications, processes and people across and beyond an enterprise, giving organizations the power to reduce complexities, extend the value of existing IT investments and dynamically respond to changing business conditions.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the most important software technology and architecture to emerge to industry-wide prominence since the Internet. The basis for Service Orientation and Service Oriented Architecture starts with the business. A service is simply a business task. To successfully gain IT flexibility and solve real business problems -- like increasing customer service, integrating with business partners, or gaining a unified view of your business...just to name a few -- you need a strong and tight link between business and IT.
An SOA enables flexible connectivity of applications or resources by representing every application or resource as a service with a standardized interface. This enables the exchange of structured information about business events, including messages, documents, and business objects, quickly and flexibly. This flexibility enables new and existing applications to be easily and quickly combined to address changing business needs, and the ability to easily combine and choreograph applications allows IT services to more readily reflect business processes. The result is the ability to unlock, integrate and share information across many isolated groups of applications that perform well within their own domain but were previously unable to share their data around the business.
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| IBM White paper: Unleash the power of mainframe assets into SOA. September 2007 |
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| Web services technology and standards have now matured to a level that enables and encourages enterprise SOA deployments. SOA promises new levels of speed, flexibility, integration and adaptability for business applications in every industry and in every size of organization. SOA currently represents the fastest growing software segment in the marketplace. In fact, according to Gartner, eighty percent of customers will be using Service Oriented Architecture by 2008. A service oriented approach means looking at a business as linked services and considering the outcomes they bring. IBM is rated as a leader in eight Service Oriented Architecture-related Gartner Magic Quadrants. |
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IBM Mainframes just got even more cost competitive. Let us
