Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Look Beyond Inflexible Legacy Systems to SOA Solutions
As information technology advances, and you've been left to integrate old applications with new programs, old hardware with new systems, and old business processes with more efficient ones, you've likely encountered many obstacles along the way. Older applications and systems can be too rigid, making it difficult to integrate with new systems. It's easy to find your enterprise using successive generations of incomplete solutions.
A service-oriented architecture leverages your existing IT investments and promotes a high level of operational awareness, refashioning them as modular, standards-based services that can be easily reused and integrated with other technology. Among other things, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) promises to:
- Improve business agility;
- Make business services more broadly available and reusable;
- Eliminate boundaries between business functions.
Promote SOA Responsiveness to Overcome Challenges and Enjoy all the Benefits
Service-oriented architecture can deliver on its promises, but a real-world SOA solution has many challenges, extending from design to management. These challenges are largely driven by IT stack vendors and result in substantial middleware costs, vendor lock-in, and a linear approach to deployment that doesn't conform to the true realities of building a SOA.
Designing a service-oriented architecture often comes with the requirement that organizations deploy another layer of middleware via yet another IT stack. Unfortunately, the costs of doing so often outweigh the sought-after benefits promised by SOA. In addition to the upfront costs of purchasing and deploying the middleware, the ongoing hardware and maintenance costs can monopolize valuable resources and limit productivity. Such complex options require expensive servers and create vendor lock-in—ending this hold middleware has on SOA infrastructure is critical to SOA success.
Your systems span departments and geographies. You must integrate, and provide end-to-end visibility and business insight across many different platforms, data sources and applications. Your systems need to be fast, secure and always available, in spite of these challenges:
- Many Platforms - Your environment is diverse; your SOA must incorporate different operating systems, programming languages, data models, application servers and applications.
- Multi-Site - Your business is distributed, so your service-oriented architecture must span systems running on many computers, managed by different IT groups located anywhere around the world.
- Continuously Available - Your SOA can't go down.
Take an Innovative Approach to Services-Oriented Architecture
Progress Software leverages the best aspects of open source and commercial software and adds enterprise-class service and support from a single vendor to create a more flexible, affordable, and innovative way of designing a service-oriented architecture. Progress' unique approach to SOA includes a free, full-featured open integration core comprised of the world's most popular open source projects, and backed by enterprise class support. Companies can add to this core with commercial components to handle more specialized SOA needs such as orchestration or data interoperability.
- No more big upfront investments. Organizations can leverage open source technology at the core of their SOA infrastructure to significantly lower IT expenditures. The open source core is coupled with the ability to incrementally add service-oriented architecture components only when needed to drive down an organization's IT operational costs even further.
- No more proprietary middleware solutions. Progress' closed and open source SOA solutions are technology-neutral and standards based which eliminates vendor lock in and future-proofs IT environments.
- No more centralized hubs. With Progress SOA solutions, IT architects are not forced to use a single set of standards at every endpoint, allowing organizations to leave existing middleware investments in place. Our SOA solutions leverage existing investments and eliminate the disruption of having to replace middleware components.
Progress is one of the first and only enterprise software vendors to take this approach to solve service-oriented architecture challenges. A number of our Global 2000 customers have validated this approach by deploying a combination of our fully-integrated open source and commercial solutions to more effectively meet their unique SOA requirements in a more affordable way.
Read this free E-book, and you will think twice about a centralized, top-down approach to SOA governance. Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress explores governance that supports a socially oriented architecture.
