1.1 Overview of SOA and the Oracle SOA Suite

Changing markets, increasing competitive pressures and evolving customer needs are placing greater pressure on IT to deliver greater flexibility and speed. Today every organization is faced with the need to predict change in a global business environment, to rapidly respond to competitors, and to best exploit organizational assets for growth. In response to these challenges, leading companies are adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a means of delivering on these requirements by overcoming the complexity of their application and IT environments. SOA represents a fundamental shift in the way new applications are designed, developed, and integrated with legacy business applications, and facilitates the development of enterprise applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused.

Oracle SOA Suite is a standards-based best of breed suite that enables you to build service-oriented applications and deploy them to your choice of middleware platform. Oracle SOA Suite consists of the following:

• Integrated service environment (ISE) to develop services

• Multi-protocol enterprise service bus (ESB) to integrate applications

• Business process execution language (BPEL) -based orchestration engine to tie services into business processes

• Business rules engine to enable business policies to be captured and automated

• Web services management and security solution to enforce authentication and authorization policies on services and to monitor services and processes for compliance to SLAs

• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solution to gain real-time visibility into business entities and their interactions, and enables services to be optimized

• Enterprise Portal for employees, customers and partners to access content, access relevance performance metrics, collaborate and take actions via interaction with business processes

• Services registry for discovering and managing the lifecycle of services

Read this chapter to understand:

• Key benefits of SOA

• Key benefits of Oracle SOA Suite