What is SOA?

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Accelerate internal initiatives by moving to a flexible IT architecture that is based on reusable components and composite applications.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to align ‘business’ and ‘technology’ along shared enterprise goals.
SOA provides a standard way of representing and interacting with Technology assets. The technology assets become building blocks, or services, that can be configured and reused in developing other applications.
SOA shifts the focus to application assembly rather than implementation details.
Services can be assembled in a coordinated sequence called a business process.
The business processes are designed to be lean, flexible, and disciplined to allow rapid adaptation to changing demands (provided through SOA governance.)
The orchestration of the services into business processes can transform an organization’s product/service lifecycles and supply chains. This service orchestration can save significant time and money for the organization.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is often an ideal to use in an IT environment where software and hardware from multiple vendors is deployed.

Why do organizations need SOA?

Markets and technologies are changing more quickly than ever, so the ability to adapt is becoming a key competitive advantage for large organizations, requiring:

• Real-Time Visibility: The power to see what is happening right now across you operations and marketplace.

• Real-Time Understanding: The power to make sense of it all so you can understand developing situations.

• Real-Time Action: The power to adapt immediately to seize opportunities, mitigate risks and avoid threats.

ABPII implements SOA using myriad solutions including SAP, TIBCO, and IBM.

Implementing SOA using TIBCO solutions

ABPII seeks to deliver business process management (BPM) on a service-oriented architecture (SOA.) The challenge is to overcome the workflow approach with limited connectivity or an inte­gration approach with limited BPM functionality. ABPII implements a unified architecture for BPM in an SOA environment from TIBCO that overcomes these limitations.
Using this unified approach results in a process layer and a service layer, each independent of the other. Changes can be made to processes without affecting the underlying services and the line-of-business applications with which they interact. Similarly, changes can be made to the technical underpinnings of the service without impacting those business processes using the service.

Benefits:

The TIBCO solutions we implement have considerable flexibility. Their modular and scalable offering lets you start small, while benefiting from an architecture and approach that lets you add capabilities as your needs grow. This flex­ible design approach significantly increases process agility, isolates the impact of change and allows the specialized skills of business analysts and IT developers to be properly harnessed.

The independent and technology-neutral approach to integration and BPM lets organizations leverage and extend assets without the risk of vendor or technology lock-in.

The Goal: Independent Process and Service Layer

When Business Process Management (BPM) is deployed on an SOA, the services are used as building blocks that can be orchestrated via BPM to model complex business processes. In addi­tion to creating new services, a key design principle of SOA is the ability to wrap components of existing legacy applications, and then expose those components as services that can be called by different business processes. Not only does this reduce time and costs, since it avoids having to build and test new code, but it also mitigates risk of process failure since SOA lever­ages services that have already been proven through production use.

The elegance of this approach is that business analysts need not concern themselves with the technical underpinnings of the service. Instead, they can focus attention on the business process. When that process requires a service, they just need to select the correct service and the inputs and outputs between the process and service. At the same time, augmentations made to the service by IT developers should not have any impact on existing processes that use the service. As IT increases the depth and breadth of service assets, business processes require less and less complex development, and business analysts gain greater control over the end-to-end process; each group can work in an independent but collaborative manner to quickly and economically implement process management. Deploying BPM on an SOA results in a more agile and efficient enterprise.

Implementing SOA using SAP solutions

ABPII implements the SAP NetWeaver platform to allow you to align your IT infrastructure with your business strategy. SAP NetWeaver is a composition platform that allows you to compose new business solutions quickly, while obtaining more business value from your existing IT investments. As the foundation for an enterprise service-oriented architecture SAP NetWeaver provides a business-driven technology approach for greater flexibility and better cost efficiencies

Benefits:
SAP NetWeaver helps you evolve your current IT landscape into a strategic environment that drives business change. It also helps you address immediate IT problems within your IT budget. SAP NetWeaver provides an open, flexible, and adaptable platform that addresses the challenges of today’s IT infrastructures and tomorrow’s IT evolution.

The Goal: An answer for today, a plan for tomorrow.

SAP NetWeaver also helps you address immediate IT problems within your IT budget. To help you prioritize your work, SAP provides a set of IT practices that identify IT tasks that you can perform using SAP NetWeaver. You can use these IT practices to map business requirements to specific IT projects in a flexible, step-by-step approach at low cost. SAP NetWeaver provides an open, flexible, and adaptable platform that addresses the challenges of today’s IT infrastructures and tomorrow’s IT evolution.