Intelligent Enterprise

7. Build Up From SOA to Business Integration. Establishing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a major accomplishment: so great that even after all the hype, most organizations have progressed only as far as the drawing board. While SOA looks good as a cheaper, "thinner" way of integrating legacy applications, organizations don't want to stop there. They want more than just another layer over the "cement" that brings them no closer to full business agility. And they want the sizzle: loosely coupled, reusable business services and composite applications made from plug-and-play Web services.

"SOA should represent a shift away from integration as middleware to integration as architecture," says Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. In other words, to understand the full potential of SOA, organizations need to look beyond SOA to what they might build once they have it.

Thus, when leading-edge firms today talk about SOA, they also talk about business process management, process modeling and orchestration via an expanded enterprise service bus. Or they talk about using SOA to increase the number of users they can support and the variety of service configurations they can create, often through a portfolio of solutions from software-as-a-service providers.

Organizations that have moved forward with SOA as a new platform for business integration are trailblazers, feeling their way toward solutions to sometimes severe XML scalability, performance and management challenges inherent in SOA designs. In 2007, we may see Web 2.0 options take some of the performance pressure off with more "human-centered" approaches to information delivery and integration. After all, business integration is about more than middleware: It's about connecting people so they can collaborate like never before. --David Stodder