Building Interoperability And Federation Into Your SOA Platform Strategy

As large and heterogeneous enterprises reach greater service-oriented architecture (SOA) maturity, enterprise architects often find that different business areas or domains need different things from an enterprise-level SOA platform. Accommodating these requirements may call for architects to segment their SOA platform strategy and build in an extra level of interoperability and federation between different SOA domains. SOA platform federation may be driven by heterogeneity of SOA infrastructure and products across domains, but it can also occur in a homogeneous platform that is configured differently for each domain. Architects should separate true business requirements from accidents of history that may reflect weak architectural governance, decide which patterns of interoperability and federation are truly necessary, and then expand the SOA platform strategy to accommodate these requirements. And in the future, architects at firms large and small will find that these same patterns will help their business participate in peer-to-peer B2B communities enabled by software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing.