1.2 SOA Benefits

Increasingly fragmented and complex infrastructures are limiting IT's ability to deliver on business needs. Many organizations have inherited disjointed legacy systems and packaged applications, a large proportion of which were never designed for information interoperability, integration, and reuse. The result of this is that most of the IT budget goes into maintenance of the current IT infrastructure and only a small amount is available for new functionalities to drive new business opportunities. The major portion of budget for new capabilities goes into the cost of integrating new functionality into the existing systems that offers poor support for interoperability.Traditionally, business information systems have been developed with a functional orientation often resulting in silos of services and information. The fundamental problem with this is that end-to-end business processes, which must span silos, are not adaptable to change as business needs evolve. The processes become fragmented and embedded deep within systems. Enterprise application integration (EAI) and other traditional middleware solutions partially address this by enabling systems to communicate with each other, but they don't fully solve the problem. Their ability to create cross application business processes is inadequate, and they allow only limited business process adaptability. Moreover, these traditional solutions come at a high cost. The majority of EAI and traditional middleware solutions use proprietary technology, which causes dependency on specialized skills and to that single vendor's products. In addition, the systems become tightly coupled, so if an interface change occurs in one system, all other systems need to be adjusted. So not only does the technology make it difficult to make changes; it can become cost-prohibitive to do so.

SOA helps address the fragmented IT landscape and addresses the difficulties associated with silos of IT infrastructure and applications. It enables greater flexibility through:

Greater interoperability: SOA, and the industry standards underpinning it, enable existing siloed applications to interoperate seamlessly and in an easier to maintain manner than any traditional EAI solution.
Increased reuse: Once legacy systems and applications are service enabled, these services can be reused, which results in reduced ongoing development costs and results in reduced time to market. Further, business processes built as an orchestration of services can also be exposed as services, further increasing reuse.
More agile business processes: SOA reduces the gap between the business process model and implementation. This enables changes to business processes already implemented as orchestrations of services to be to be easily captured and implemented.
Improved visibility: SOA can give improved business visibility by enabling business capabilities exposed as services, and the status of in-flight business processes automated with Business process management (BPM) technology, to be rapidly integrated into service-enabled enterprise portals aiding business decision-making.
Reduced maintenance costs: SOA development encourages duplicated overlapping business capabilities (services) that span multiple applications and systems to be consolidated into a small number of shared services. This enables elimination of redundant services and reduces the cost of maintaining systems by providing a single point of change for application logic. Further, SOA gives IT the means to gradually phase out legacy systems and applications while minimizing disruption to the applications that are built on or are integrated with them using SOA principles. This frees up funds for new projects.
Compliance and governance: By realizing better and more standardized operational procedures, SOA provides the basis for a comprehensive security solution, and enables better visibility into business operations and exception conditions.

ISEs enable developers to expose application functionality as services. ESB technology makes service connections less brittle when changes need to be made. For example, ESB supports a logical naming construct and decouples applications from protocols and data formats. BPM solutions such as those based on BPEL enable services to be orchestrated into business processes. Processes built using a BPM solution can be reused, changed easily in response to business requirements, and enable real-time process visibility. Business activity monitoring solutions realize monitoring of KPIs and SLAs and enable business entities to take preemptive actions.