Where SOA comes into picture?

There's been a lot of noise and confusion over Service Oriented Architecture in the market for quite some time now. In this article, we clear the fog around this concept by telling you what it is and isn't, as well as where it actually comes into picture.

Suppose you want to get your address changed in this bank. The process for the same would be to go to the bank, or maybe send them an e-mail to get this done. This process would take time. Suppose the bank extended a part of its internal CRM application directly to the customer over a thin client or even the Web and allowed the change to happen directly, after authentication of course. Adding such a capability into your CRM application would require you to update it, which could take plenty of time. That's where SOA comes into the picture. This would allow you to easily extend your existing business applications' capabilities to the customer, without ripping through the application's code. It would do this by providing a loosely coupled service between the application and the user interface.

So the bottomline is that every organization has various business applications running. SOA allows you to extend their capabilities or integrate them without disturbing them too much. This allows an organization to expand its business and offer new services to customers faster than traditional methods. Another area where SOA shines is in company mergers. When a merger happens, chances are that the merging companies would have different applications, platforms, etc. These could be performing redundant or completely different processes. SOA can help integrate these platforms without bringing in major changes to the existing infrastructure.