Raving Mad About has previous experience designing and implementing SOA solutions in enterprise level environments. With our background and expertise, we can help you weigh up the numerous options and considerations when deploying an SOA strategy.
The need to continue delivering integration/orchestration projects and the wish to start delivering a comprehensive SOA vision are two potentially conflicting requirements that need to be balanced. Too much focus on the former will result in a throw-away solution that doesn't progress the latter. Too much focus on the latter will result in a long-term, never ending project where the former is never successfully or cost-effectively achieved.
There is, thankfully, a middle ground and Microsoft’s BizTalk technology is able to fulfill that if the implementation is approached in the right way. The following extract is taken from a Microsoft white paper:
"While a well planned and executed SOA undertaking can help organizations realize greater responsiveness in a changing marketplace, not all service oriented efforts have been successful. SOA projects have limited success when they are driven from the bottom up by developers; building SOA for the sake of SOA without reference to the business context is a project without organizing principles and guidance; the result is a chaotic implementation that has no business relevance. On the other hand, taking a top-down mega-approach to SOA requires such enormous time investments that by the time the project is complete, the solution no longer maps to business needs.
In contrast, Microsoft advocates what it calls a “middle out” approach. In this approach, SOA efforts are driven by strategic vision and business needs, and are met through incremental, iterative SOA projects that are designed to deliver on business goals one business need at a time. Microsoft has successfully helped customers with their SOA efforts since 1999, when it first announced its Web services model and followed up with the release of the .NET Framework and SOA tools and design approaches built into its application platform. Since then, Microsoft’s real world approach has helped organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes and realize greater business agility and faster time to value through use of Microsoft’s SOA design principles, best practices, tools and technologies."
Raving Mad About will work closely with you throughout the project to deliver the SOA vision, covering the initial architecting through continued joint work on specific integration/orchestration projects and any subsequent support. Our aim will be to transfer skills in all appropriate areas during this process to provide you with as much self-sufficiency as possible and appropriate, which will also keep on-going integration costs lower.
Request a call back from one of our experienced business consultants.
