Topic Overview: SOA And Beyond For Enterprise Architects

With 74% of the Global 2000 now using service-oriented architecture (SOA), most architects recognize that SOA is about much more than Web services and better application integration. SOA continues to gain industry recognition as a key element of strategic business transformation — which represents a much higher level of business impact than mere application integration. Strategically, SOA-based business services provide a modular, digital-world implementation of your business that is a foundation for many business-oriented architectural directions that go far beyond SOA. For architects to lead their organizations on a successful journey to SOA — and beyond — they must understand SOA's overarching concepts, its relationship to business design, and its impact on governance, technology platforms, and solution delivery life cycles. Then they must build strategies both for SOA and for the larger architectural shifts around it.