Embracing Your Application Vendor's Competing SOA Vision

Commercial application vendors are service-orienting their offerings at various paces, but the move to service-oriented architecture (SOA) is inevitable. Each vendor's own SOA vision will guide its key design, policy, and procedural decisions, and these vendor decisions won't precisely align with similar decisions you've made about your own SOA strategy. You want to get the largest possible benefit from these new applications, leveraging their service orientation as much as possible. Consequently, you face the challenge of accommodating your chosen vendors' SOA visions without sacrificing your own. Your first priority will be maintaining the integrity and value of your enterprise service portfolio, followed by establishing the right process and policy connections to accommodate application integration and ongoing updates. Understanding the thinking, design decisions, and policies underpinning your application vendors' SOA strategies is essential to avoiding surprises, achieving an effective across-the-board approach, and maximizing the business value of this new breed of applications.