Service Oriented Architecture - SOA

One is mainstream, discussed in business strategy circles. The other is the hot topic at emerging technology conferences. The first is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the other is Web 2.0. These two strategies have much in common. SOA is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. Web 2.0 is a set of philosophies and technologies that can foster innovation, speed, and simplicity. Together these approaches increase the agility of your business to create products and services for new markets, increase efficiency, and collaboration – with speed and simplicity.

By using IBM's SOA products - businesses can accelerate their adoption of innovative Web 2.0 technologies - taking advantage of IBM's SOA portfolio wide set of Web 2.0 enhancements to reuse existing assets and decrease time and cost to deploy newer Web 2.0 applications.

Web 2.0 is about connecting people, and making technology efficient for people. Web 2.0 changes the way businesses interact with customers with economic, community and technology impacts. Learn more about IBM’s view of how Web 2.0 goes to work for your business.

How SOA and Web 2.0 work together

Businesses are using SOA and Web 2.0 to reach new markets and improve efficiency and collaboration. Web 2.0 extends the reach of SOA using technologies such as AJAX and REST - making it simple for both business users and less advanced programmers to create or remix their own rich applications and to access services through the web.

Enabling this new Web 2.0 functionality requires increased content and infrastructure flexibility – which is where SOA comes into play. When you combine SOA with Web 2.0, you get two related approaches focusing on 1) connecting people and systems together more easily, 2) making software and data available for reuse via services, and 3) building new value upon the foundation of existing information resources and IT assets.

With Web 2.0, this flexibility is realised through an approach referred to as “mashups”, which leverage the business process building blocks to deliver information to people rapidly and flexibly. In the Web 2.0 world, a mashup is a quickly built composite Web 2.0 application that combines capabilities from existing web-based applications in a new way to create new value for the user. SOA services are the raw material for Web 2.0 mashups.

The Value of SOA and Web 2.0

Web 2.0 enables non-technical knowledge workers to build ad-hoc “mashup” applications on their own to address immediate business needs. By using intuitive Web 2.0 tools, such as browser based mashup assembly tools, employees can assemble existing content, connect it together, and share it with co-workers, customers, and business partners to facilitate business in an exciting new way. People can remix and transform a wealth of content from the enterprise via SOA and that is readily available on the Web, such as Google Maps, to solve their problem their way. This enables IT departments to reduce application backlog and accelerate time to value for their business users.

By combining SOA with the flexibility and speed of Web 2.0 mashups, new applications can quickly, easily be written and implemented, at a lower cost. IT is able to reduce cycle time and time to market – more rapidly address application backlog and serve the business with speed and agility.

To get started today, talk to your IBM representative about your business goals or contact IBM directly at response@in.ibm.com.

With Smart SOA, you can find value at every stage of the SOA continuum, from departmental projects to enterprise-wide initiatives.