The Push to Do More with Less
You’re likely strapped for resources and your expertise likely encompasses a limited
number of technologies.
New challenges face your business:
- Get to the Web
- Integrate with an expanded supply chain across multiple technologies
- Interface with business partners
- Respond quickly to new business needs
- Supply information in real time to management and your customers
The Challenge: Achieving Agility and Productivity
To achieve agility and productivity, you need a
pragmatic approach to implementing change. You must leverage all of the resources you have—including the investment you’ve made in your existing
and legacy applications. How can you do this quickly with the highest possible return on investment?
The answer lies in the
implementation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Perhaps better described as a "methodology," SOA seeks to define reusable components or
"services"—repeatable business tasks—that contain application logic that performs a specific business function such as "validate customer number"
or "insert employee ID number." These services are defined in business terms, without regard to a specific application, operating system,
programming language, or platform.
The benefits are clear:
- Increased reusability, flexibility, and agility so that your organization can respond quickly to rapidly changing environments.
- Increased productivity and lower costs resulting from managing changes to business processes, rather than maintaining the way in which
those processes are addressed in dozens of individual applications.
SMBs Have the Most to Gain
The distance between where you are today and a full SOA implementation may seem to be great,
requiring too many skills that don’t currently exist in your organization and too many resources from a staff that is already stretched too
thin.
Yet small- and medium-sized businesses, even more than large enterprises, have the most to gain once SOA is in place. Smaller companies
will benefit from:
- The ability to respond quickly to changes in the business when few, if any, resources are available to devote to the effort
- Ensuring that the investment in legacy systems will be maximized so that new systems don’t have to be purchased or rebuilt
- Platform independence, when resources do not exist for learning new platforms or for revising program interfaces for a plethora of operating
systems and languages.
Read how Magic Software’s comprehensive technology
stack addresses SOA.
