A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture

Many years from now, it will be taken for granted that applications should be assembled from a collection of loosely coupled modules and that applications, and in some cases modules, should easily talk to each other using consistent, open standards based protocols. In other words, SOA will become the architectural norm.

Starting today, an SOA offers solid ROI. SOAs make legacy application integration and EAI straightforward processes. New application development is made cheaper and faster using an SOA, and the resulting applications are more reliable and cheaper to maintain.

Having a large variety of choices that enable you to move quickly and inexpensively between those choices is a hallmark of an agile enterprise. Service-Oriented Architecture is an excellent architectural style to provide agility to business processes.