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SOA Overview
X-INTEGRATE and SOA
We X-INTEGRATE people see and live SOA as a business opportunity for our customers. Hereby we realise strategic location economies for the organisation as well as for enterprise IT. Our consulting offers are based on a comprehensive understanding of your business goals and an integrated analysis of your IT environment. Our claim in every project step is to generate a fundamental understanding of the new architecture before implementation. We achieve this goal using our pre-assembled packaged solutions or a customer individual approach - hereby a close collaboration and coordinative communication are essential for us. Our special competence hereby consists of the sensitive transfer of legacy systems into a service oriented IT world.
What is a SOA:
The most important aspect of a SOA discussion is to understand it at first as a management concept - a SOA is always at first a conceptual approach and not a concrete technological suggestion. With this understanding of SOA and it being a management concept, the goal should be to aline IT with the business processes (business demands). According to the architectural concept services and functionalities will be provided. A business process is then orchestrated out of these services - which at first are to be seen as generic and reusable business process steps. The individual services can be used to orchestrate different process flows like a modular system. You choose from a pool of provided services - which are deposited in a so called service repository. From a rather technical point of view, the few existing standards as SOAP, WDSL and UDDI are used to realise SOA web services.
SOA – Link between business processes and IT
As easy as possible, as complex as necessary!
An objective view to practise shows today that the fewest IT infrastructures fulfil the demand of their original implementation. The reasons for that are cross - industrial individually different, but abstracted in sum absolutely comparable - because there are no budgets, because cost pressure slows down innovation, because there are no resources, because demands are not specified exactly...
As a result, many IT environments are build up that reduced that they cannot meet original demands. Others are created that complex regarding architecture and implementation that no effective operating and no flexible usage is possible. Existing IT budgets suffer from this - even more dramatic enterprise agility and flexibility. And this, although exactly the last point is to be stated as a factor of success in an more and more highly competitive market.
Independent from industry- and market - specific singularity, almost all enterprises own processes and workflows which fulfil defined standards SOA makes it possible to support these processes with an exactly dosed complexity and to make design, operation and development as easy as possible - a tailor made IT infrastructure.
A practical example as analogy
A service oriented architecture is very similar to the classical engineering regarding idea, attributes and design. The construction of a new car is possible in a very short time and defined quality using norms, universal standards, modularisation and enclosure of functionality - in shorter time intervals, with increased flexibility and a high reactivity towards market demands in already progressed design phases.
Take a simple tire fitting as an example. No one would ever think of designing a new interface or tool for this, in fact a standard is established which makes a fast and cost efficient fitting possible - as well as the very fast and easy exchange of the wheel, independent from the tire used. You can see the rim as the standard interface for tire fitting. These design mechanisms, construction principles and parameters also help to realise economic profit out of within the context of a service oriented architecture made IT investments, to be able to better mobilise resources in a reactive IT environment and to stay competitive in the global competition.
We X-INTEGRATE people see and live SOA as a business opportunity for our customers. Hereby we realise strategic location economies for the organisation as well as for enterprise IT. Our consulting offers are based on a comprehensive understanding of your business goals and an integrated analysis of your IT environment. Our claim in every project step is to generate a fundamental understanding of the new architecture before implementation. We achieve this goal using our pre-assembled packaged solutions or a customer individual approach - hereby a close collaboration and coordinative communication are essential for us. Our special competence hereby consists of the sensitive transfer of legacy systems into a service oriented IT world.
What is a SOA:
The most important aspect of a SOA discussion is to understand it at first as a management concept - a SOA is always at first a conceptual approach and not a concrete technological suggestion. With this understanding of SOA and it being a management concept, the goal should be to aline IT with the business processes (business demands). According to the architectural concept services and functionalities will be provided. A business process is then orchestrated out of these services - which at first are to be seen as generic and reusable business process steps. The individual services can be used to orchestrate different process flows like a modular system. You choose from a pool of provided services - which are deposited in a so called service repository. From a rather technical point of view, the few existing standards as SOAP, WDSL and UDDI are used to realise SOA web services.
SOA – Link between business processes and IT
As easy as possible, as complex as necessary!
An objective view to practise shows today that the fewest IT infrastructures fulfil the demand of their original implementation. The reasons for that are cross - industrial individually different, but abstracted in sum absolutely comparable - because there are no budgets, because cost pressure slows down innovation, because there are no resources, because demands are not specified exactly...
As a result, many IT environments are build up that reduced that they cannot meet original demands. Others are created that complex regarding architecture and implementation that no effective operating and no flexible usage is possible. Existing IT budgets suffer from this - even more dramatic enterprise agility and flexibility. And this, although exactly the last point is to be stated as a factor of success in an more and more highly competitive market.
Independent from industry- and market - specific singularity, almost all enterprises own processes and workflows which fulfil defined standards SOA makes it possible to support these processes with an exactly dosed complexity and to make design, operation and development as easy as possible - a tailor made IT infrastructure.
A practical example as analogy
A service oriented architecture is very similar to the classical engineering regarding idea, attributes and design. The construction of a new car is possible in a very short time and defined quality using norms, universal standards, modularisation and enclosure of functionality - in shorter time intervals, with increased flexibility and a high reactivity towards market demands in already progressed design phases.
Take a simple tire fitting as an example. No one would ever think of designing a new interface or tool for this, in fact a standard is established which makes a fast and cost efficient fitting possible - as well as the very fast and easy exchange of the wheel, independent from the tire used. You can see the rim as the standard interface for tire fitting. These design mechanisms, construction principles and parameters also help to realise economic profit out of within the context of a service oriented architecture made IT investments, to be able to better mobilise resources in a reactive IT environment and to stay competitive in the global competition.
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SOA explained in 3 minutes