Service-Oriented Architecture is an approach to organizing, developing and integrating information technology in which data, logic, and infrastructure resources are organized as services and accessed by exchanging messages with one another to support flexible business processes and enabling IT to become accelerator for business agility and innovation.
An important aspect of any SOA initiative is the service enablement of existing IT assets. Integrating a packaged line of business application, a custom developed solution or a “legacy” mainframe application into your SOA each present unique challenges such as proprietary wire and application protocols, metadata lookup, and transaction management. Built on a common foundation of the .NET Framework each solution below provides a path to service enablement for each of these types of assets.
Microsoft SOA infrastructure solutions provide the agility that organizations require by adding coordination, visibility, and manageability of services to the benefits of interoperability through service discovery, mediation and virtualization. Through this approach, organizations can deploy services faster, embrace changes as they occur, and maximize the reuse of system and infrastructure components. In addition to the solutions below Microsoft partners with industry leading governance providers such as AmberPoint and SOA Software as part of the Business Process Alliance.
While a great deal of focus is place on the implementation and provision of services into an organization’s SOA it is just as important to recognize that service deliver no value until they are consumed either by another service or by an end user facing application. Increasingly end users want access to their services and experiences across multiple channels including office desktop, web sites, and mobile devices. While these have many requirements in common, such as delivering composite UIs, they also each have to deal with unique requirements for the consumption of services.
