Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Your service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform — the software infrastructure and tools you use to build, configure, deploy, monitor, and manage services — heavily influences your ability to attain the strategic business flexibility and benefits that service orientation promises. Rather than buying a single vendor product, you will build your strategic SOA platform from multiple products, each of which provides one or more functions such as security, transactions, version resolution, event management, reliable delivery, service repository, business process flow control, metadata management, business reporting, dynamic policy, service management, and more. But you can't build it all at once, nor should you try to. Instead, use an SOA platform vision — crafted in line with SOA's value for enabling flexible business change, rich business connections, and strong business control — to guide a stepwise evolution that starts with your current application platform and develops in line with your path(s) to SOA.