- Mythbuster busts his own tale
- 10 open source companies to watch
- Sony recalls 73,000 Vaio laptops
- Tool to evade China's Web censorship
- Chrome and Firefox and add-ons
Newsletters | Podcasts | Chats | Opinions | RSS Feeds | This Week In Print | IT Careers | Community | Reports | Downloads | Slideshows | New Data Center
Partner Sites:App Performance | On Demand Security | Networking Solution | SOA | Value of WDS
SOA – service-oriented architecture – is one of the most talked about and least understood topics in IT today. It even has its own “Dummies” book. As an approach to building IT systems, SOA connects applications across a network via a common communications protocol, allowing organizations to reuse old software, often with the help of Web services. Saugatuck Technology predicts that up to two-thirds of IT departments will have a limited or full SOA production environment by next year. Here we examine six burning questions IT organizations face when they choose SOA.
1. Is anyone saving (or making money) using SOA?
Ashok Kumar of Avis Budget Group says he is. Avis began using SOA about two years ago in portions of the company to open new channels with travel partners. “They can now do direct business with us without having to go through a middleman. So it’s saved them a couple bucks, saved us a couple of bucks,” says Kumar, who is based in New Jersey and is director of services architecture information technology. “The cost of bringing on new partners is down to nothing now because of SOA.”
Avis Budget can now bring on a new partner in a day instead of a month, he says, because with SOA it is just a matter of configuring a service rather than making large application changes. “When we started that the cost of bringing on a new partner was anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000, now it’s down to $3,000 or $4,000,” he says.
Any company will face up-front costs associated with implementing SOA, but many IT experts say it can lower expenses in the long run. You can’t look at SOA in terms of short-term return on investment, says industry analyst Judith Hurwitz, lead author of Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies.
“It’s the type of technology that your real goal is reuse and the ability to loosely couple components together,” Hurwitz says. “You can’t look at this for short-term benefit because in fact the real gain happens when change happens.”
Traditional approaches to building software assume you start from scratch and develop something designed to solve a specific problem, Hurwitz notes. SOA allows businesses to be flexible and seamlessly react to major changes. A business might not see much benefit from SOA for months after deployment, but if it is suddenly involved in an acquisition “there’s a major change in their ability to cope with that change and react and then provide the software,” Hurwitz says.

In this whitepaper learn how Retrospective Network Analysis (RNA) has proved a different type of...
SNMP Monitorin One Critical Component to Network ManagementSNMP is a valuable tool to any network administrator who requires complete visibility into the...
Monitoring and Managing App PerformanceThis paper defines application analysis, discusses the different categories of tools on the market,...

Double-Take (r) Software and Microsoft are teaming up on September 9, 2008 for a webinar focusing...
PoE Plus: Impact on the PoE MarketThe standard for Power over Ethernet (PoE), IEEE Std. 802.3af(tm)-2003, advanced networking,...
Intelligent Mobility: BlackBerry Technical Seminar 2008The virtual BlackBerry Technical Seminar keeps growing in popularity every year, and we want to...

Find out why analysts say approaching virtualization with an ounce of caution is wise. And also why...
Closing the Loop: Extending Wireless LAN Security to Wireless PrintersEnterprises cannot overlook wireless printers when assessing network security. The print jobs and...
Ethernet Services: WAN options matureWAN Ethernet services are reliable, cost-efficient offerings that are widely available and in a...
Partner Content
NetScout is one of the world's premier providers of integrated network and application performance solutions.
www.netscout.com
Know First
Get Proactive — Move from Troubleshooting to Monitoring to Management with nGenius K2's Service Dashboard & Intelligent Early Warning Alarms
Watch the Video
Know Where
Get Rapid Performance Problem Isolation with nGenius Performance Manager and Diagnose Problems up to 70% Faster!
Learn More
Know Why
Get the Details to Validate and Solve your Toughest Performance Issues with nGenius InfiniStream and Sniffer Intelligence Modules
Read the Whitepaper
Comment