Stages of SOA adoption

Systinet, a provider of?SOA governance and life-cycle management solutions,?offers a useful model for understanding SOA?adoption. Among the three stages the?company?recognizes:

Phase One: Web Services?Enablement. This is a tactical implementation of Web services where existing applications have standard Web services interfaces. Replacing proprietary APIs reduces integration complexity for these applications. These developer-driven implementations have modest returns on investment in the short-term.

Phase?Two: Business Services Enablement. Success with simple Web services encourages a systematic, enterprise-level approach in the next phase. This architect-driven phase requires added visibility, compliance, governance and manageability to transform Web services into business services with a focus on reuse. The primary benefit of reuse is increased alignment to business, and consequentially, improved agility to facilitate business change. Impact?analysis and reporting are key outcomes.

Phase Three: Dynamic Interoperability. The desire to support composite applications and agile or "on-demand" computing drives this phase, which is characterized by "Dynamic Business Interoperability." Here, the Web services platforms are able to create more intelligent business services (i.e. endpoints) with support for advanced security, reliable messaging, and policy enforcement. Then, by managing business services using high-level business and application definitions called meta-data, change to IT or business processes can be dynamically managed, further increasing agility and dramatically lowering operational costs.

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