It looks obvious

When I started this blog I made a decision not to write anything about my working place. The opinions I express and my interests are private and have nothing to do with my working place. I also avoid revealing any information about the corporation I’m working for because it is irrelevant and I don’t want any confusion between my personal opinion and the company position about certain issues or technologies. I’m giving this somewhat long disclaimer so it is clear that whatever is written inthis blog is only my personal impression.

I attended today “SOA Leadership Roundtable”. The object of the conference was to discuss:

“Businesses rely heavily on rapid response from IT, yet development costs remain high and legacy infrastructure remains. Innovative organizations are looking to service-oriented architecture (SOA) to reduce costs, increase IT responsiveness, and provide rapid access to legacy systems.”

For many years corporation are struggling to create tools that will enable efficient communication between different legacy systems, managing changes in the same paste as the business change and the communication between the business units of the corporation and the I.T. developer.
One of the recent approaches to solve these problems is the S.O.A. (Service oriented architecture) which is basically a middleware built on the base of web services. These web services enable the communication between the different systems and between the different user interfaces and the backend systems. Such unified middleware if manage properly, can simplify the maintenance of the corporation business rules and enable easier introduction of changes.
For example if in one organization you have many different that need the customer details it is more efficient to have one web service that provide and update customer information.
The additional benefit is if you get an application that will manage these web services and will allow the business users make changes in the business rules without developers involve. This is actually the holy grail of I.T. and Im not sure that the applications that manage SOA are capable of doing this task, although the claim that they can.
It was very interesting to see how much similar are the problems that I.T. departments in completely different industries need to deal with. Many of the problems we are dealing with are not that unique as we might believe. There is another similarity that I found interesting and one that I probably need check more deeply. The terms used in this discussion and the terms used by Web 2.0 companies and advocates are very close. There isn’t much different between “let the business user make changes” to “Let your customer design your product”. Web Services as an approach are very similar to the service developed and mashed together. The Web 2.0 companies, such as salesforce.com, that will rise to the challenge of developing solutions for corporations will be the one that will make it, not the one that writing the 100^th social network…

Technorati Tags: SOA, Web 2.0, Web Services, Open API