Putting the Serve in Server

Anyone who’s used Amazon.com to purchase a book or CD has experienced service-oriented architecture (SOA). Users log onto the Web site, review offerings, and place selections in a shopping cart before checking out. In the process, an order is specified through one service, which interacts with an inventory service to see if items are in stock, which links to an order and shipping service that communicates with yet another service that enables users to track their order status. The entire soup-to-nuts transaction is managed through communications via Web services—supported by a service-oriented architecture—that appears seamless to customers.

“Each part of Amazon you interact with is an independent piece of the business process, but you’d never know it,” says Manish Sharma, a managing consultant with Ciber, a systems integration firm with an office in St. Louis Park. “[The system] is so interwoven that it becomes a seamless experience for the end-user.”

The architecture of an information technology (IT) system is the way its components are connected, organized, and controlled. While you may meet with many descriptions of SOA, it’s essentially an architectural style that enables companies to make information technology (IT) operations more agile, open, and efficient by facilitating interaction between disparate parts. In short, SOA turns the heterogeneity of IT systems and services into a business asset rather than a drag on productivity or efficiency.

SOA in Action

Although the SOA concept has been around for years and manifest in technologies such as electronic data interchange, the growth of Web services platforms and universal coding languages such as XML sparked the imagination of software vendors and helped bring SOA to a more sophisticated, strategic level—and into mainstream use within organizations.

While it’s common to hear “Web services” used synonymously with “SOA,” the two are distinct animals. “I think of service-oriented architecture as a set of principles or a style, and Web services as one implementation of that style,” says Aleh Matus, owner of Modelus, LLC, an IT consulting company in Plymouth.

Web services are application components (think of Salesforce.com or Basecamp.com), and SOA is the way they are connected. Sharma compares the effect that the proliferation of Web services has had on SOA to the impact Microsoft Access software had on the database market 10 years ago. MS Access was not a comprehensive database management or warehousing system, but it did allow users to quickly develop databases to “get from A to Z quickly,” he says. Web services had a comparable effect on SOA “by allowing people to implement a federated view of their IT enterprise very quickly,” Sharma says.