Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is a hot topic in business today. You may have read about service-oriented architectures and are wondering how they can affect your business as well as how they can be of use to you. By looking at it from both a real-world perspective as well as a technical perspective, you will forge a solid understanding of service-oriented architecture from which you can jump off to implementing this technology within your business. | Written and provided by Global Knowledge estLake Web Training and Development Expert Reference Series ofWhite Papers Service-Oriented Architecture What Is It and How Can It Help Your Business 1-800-COURSES Service-Oriented Architecture What Is It and How Can It Help Your Business Charlie Fink VP of Product Development and Delivery Westlake Introduction Service-oriented architecture or SOA is a hot topic in business today. You may have read about service-oriented architectures and are wondering how they can affect your business as well as how they can be of use to you. By looking at it from both a real-world perspective as well as a technical perspective you will forge a solid understanding of service-oriented architecture from which you can jump off to implementing this technology within your business. Defining Service-Oriented Architectures Essentially a service is the implementation of some step in one or more business processes and a service-oriented architecture takes advantage of those services. More importantly service-oriented architectures have many benefits for businesses including enabling better alignment of business requirements and technology. Service-oriented architectures also allow services to be easily swapped out or reused for different purposes. And a service-oriented architecture gives your business the ability to leverage existing services easily while also leaving the option to write new services to fulfill specific purposes. Service-oriented architectures rely heavily on programming in XML a text-based mark up language that enables developers to define their own specific structure of data. However one major benefit of setting up a service-oriented architecture is that it doesn t matter which language or protocol is used. Instead the process can be written to be used across many platforms. One simple example of service-oriented architecture would be a program that installed on a computer can organize a user s digital .
