Defining Your SOA Platform Strategy

Defining an SOA platform is not as simple as some in the industry make it out to be. Serious pursuit of service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires new and different characteristics in your application infrastructure. New product categories such as SOA repositories and enterprise service buses (ESBs) provide part of what's needed, but vendors are also making SOA enhancements to existing product categories such as application servers and IT management software. An effective SOA platform must be a cohesive integration of both new and existing products. Why? To deal with the many feature and function overlaps between specialty products, to manage feature and function overlap between specialty products and existing software infrastructure, and to achieve the smooth handoffs among SOA platform elements necessary to attain high quality of service (QoS) for your services. Sorting through the confusion requires that architects define their SOA platforms function-first — starting with the specific design and architecture characteristics of SOA — and not product-first (like some in the industry do). Forrester presents a model for defining a comprehensive SOA platform.