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Building an Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (ESOA) is not easy. It's true that some impressive immediate gains can be made, but the reason we recommend moving to an ESOA is precisely to ensure that those early gains become the foundation of a truly productive and responsive service-oriented system. Without such a foundation, you may find, after a couple of years, that you have created rigid and inflexible stovepipes - service-oriented legacy!
The ESOA that positions you not only for the present but also for the future rests on a firm architectural basis that delivers:
Separation of the technology platform from the business services offered, and from the business logic that implements those services
Flexibility and responsiveness so that the services offered both within and outside the enterprise can respond fast to the evolution of the business
Previous reports in this series have illustrated some of the main concepts and approaches involved in an effective ESOA. This report deals with the technology platform that supports business services, and, more importantly, its separation from those services. Such separation is crucial in enabling business services to evolve at the speed of the business, rather than being constrained by technology change.
First we outline the rationale for separation of business services from their underlying technology infrastructure. Then we consider the nature of the ESOA - what kind of "architecture" it is. Third, we summarize some key aspects of the infrastructure products available on the market today, and discover there are some holes! Finally, we present an approach to "filling the holes".
Of course, filling holes with "glue" is what IT developers have been doing for years now. "Glue" is the colloquial name for the designs and implementations of software technology that all IT departments produce in order to add local function to COTS products. What counts, however, is not so much the filling of these holes, but the way they're filled.
Finally, we show how ESOA makes a virtue of the necessary glue to provide an effective "virtual platform" that can provide for the rigorous separation between business and technology function that is required.
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