Hi, I'm Bill Roth, Vice President of product marketing atBEA and I'd like to talk to you today about why SOA is for real. I want to takeyou into a real world example, but before I do, let's establish a bit ofhistory.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, people were buildingapplications to operating systems, but that was chaos because applicationswouldn't move between operating systems. Then Java came around, and that allowsus to establish an application infrastructure where you could writeapplications and it didn't matter what you were running on. That allowed peopleto write ERP application, CRM, Order Management. The problem now is that, Ibelieve, 3 of every 4 IT dollars is being spent gluing these applicationstogether and that's a problem.
How can we solve that problem? Service infrastructure. Whatis a service infrastructure? There are 3 pieces to it. First, there is messageservices, there is data services, and then there is security services. This isthe "what" of service oriented infrastructure.
Let me now give you the "how" as an example thatSOA is for real. So assume that you go to the hospital, you've broken your legor something. The hospital knows about you in multiple databases. They may knowabout your prescriptions in one database. They may know about your billinghistory in another, and they may know about your patient history from a thirddatabase. Now data services allows me to take all 3 of these and provide asingle view of the patient. It gives me a single patient record. This is ahospital.
Now let's say that you are cured, you go home and thehospital needs to get paid. They need to take this patient record and turn itinto something that the insurance company can understand. Now the insurancecompany knows you as a policy holder and so what needs to happen is your patientrecord needs to be transformed and then it needs to be routed to the insurancecompany. This transformation, it transforms from a patient record into thispolicy holder record that it can understand through transformation, that's howmessage services are used.
Now you don't have to look very far for examples of what SOAis being used in real life. It's being used in banking, it's being used inmanufacturing, it's being used in financial services broadly and it's beingused today and that's why SOA is for real.
