SOA in enterprise architectures: Overlooked misperceptions, pitfalls and tangible benefits

The SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is an evolution of past platforms, leveraging the successful characteristics of traditional architectures over several decades. The contemporary and the evolving standards of SOA advocate an agile, flexible software architecture leveraging Web services. Enterprise software has long suffered from a mismatch between technical and business-related concepts and priorities articulated by the people on both sides of the techno-business domain. SOA provides a unique opportunity for the first time in IT terms to create artifacts that have lasting impact and value for both the business as well as the technology side. The SOA relies heavily on loose coupling in order to establish an abstraction of business logic and technology. Achieving a state of standardized SOA throughout an enterprise requires a planned transition. SOA offer benefits at several levels, ranging from agnostic technology to a simplification of the development process to an increase in agility of the business infrastructure. The ultimate goal of an SOA is to provide an Agile Enterprise, in which all processes and services are completely flexible and can be rapidly manipulated per the needs of business. However, the SOA is a journey and not a single "switch on? implementation. With each SOA implementation, there are several lessons learned that can be leveraged for future. This paper reviews the pitfalls and tangible benefits of SOA implementation in enterprise architectures. In addition, this paper addresses the common misperceptions about SOA that are commonly maintained in the market place and in some cases, even legitimizing them.