The Teksouth Enterprise Consulting (TEC) Group

Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design philosophy, a set of best practices and a related set of vendor support software (SOA stacks). What it hasn’t been, until now, is a truly comprehensive paradigm for enterprise solutions. In other words, while the hype has promised a total solution for enterprise transformation and integration, the reality has only delivered a part of that solution.

We have built a solutions practice around that foundation which we refer to as “Actionable SOA.” Our SOA practice is built on the premise that any new technology must conform to real-world application and exploitation and that projects must be capability based. Far too many SOA projects have deployed infrastructure in search of a purpose – we build solutions for the real-world, not to demonstrate esoteric knowledge of current trends.

The word “Services” in the SOA implies a focus on application architecture. That focus represents the culmination of perhaps two decades of advances in software development. Those advances include the ability to abstract and modularize code based upon object-oriented methodology as well as the continuing improvements in further abstracting application logic from source data. SOA as we know it today, is comprised of a variety of guiding principles, technological assumptions and vendor-focused solutions. These elements include but are not limited to:

• The ability to abstract services from one another
• The ability to abstract services across infrastructures (i.e. delivery platforms), this is not in every standard definition of SOA.
• The ability to abstract services and underlying data
• The ability to support web service standards (which continue to grow in quantity and complexity), this is not in every standard definition of SOA.
• The ability to orchestrate service logic with business processes (using tools such as ebXML, BPEL, BPMN etc.), this is not in every standard definition of SOA.
• The ability to reuse services (this stems from the previous industry push towards componentization), and services code.
• The ability to discover services (using service directory paradigms / standards)
• The ability to comprehensively manage data interfaces (publish subscribe, the leftovers of the EAI trend), this is not in every standard definition of SOA.