SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is an attempt to unify diverse systems in an organization.  As time passes organization keep adding systems and processes. This means constant up gradation and need for connecting different applications within the business environment. An EDI or electronic data interchange can facilitate interaction between different systems but sometimes this can become quite messy. We should remember that presence of different systems in   an organization is unavoidable and envisaging an enterprise wide compatible system is utopian. The best we can do under the circumstances is to create an architecture which would seamlessly connect different business processes together.

SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is a group of services which are interlinked with each other. The best example of such architecture would be linking of salary accounts of employees and company profit and loss account. It is possible that the application for salary account was designed and operationalized a few years earlier. Subsequently a larger application for company account was developed. When there was a need to connect these two applications problems cropped up. How to unify two different databases? How to relate one application with another? These issues could be resolved in many different ways. SOA or Service Oriented Architecture can about to unify different systems and processes in a business environment. 

On a technical level, each application is considered as a service which can operate independently while at the same time they can be orchestrated to function as one unit. In fact the process of unifying different services in SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is called orchestration. It is in some ways like an object in object oriented programming but on a much larger scale where the units are many more. Another difference in SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is the non hierarchal structure as compared to a class hierarchy in OOP’s. It uses the web standard and therefore more flexible and easy for adaptation. At the same time real time transaction processing and computation can be challenging in an SOA approach to system integration. These issues can be addressed in different ways and with faster internet connections and better communication technology SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is fast becoming a standard in most enterprise applications.

Many software players are now offering SOA services and there is a strong movement towards coupling internal services with ready made off the shelf software services and create a viable, flexible and cost effective solution.

 

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