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The benefits of Service Oriented Architecture are clear: At the highest level, SOA is about aligning technology with business and in particular delivering agility – the rapid solving of new business integration challenges, and cost efficiency – solving the new business challenges at a much lower cost.
The heart of both these benefits is the concept of reuse: the ability to solve new business integration challenges by reusing existing deployed capabilities available in other systems. The mechanism of reuse in SOA is the service definitions. Service definitions describe the capabilities of an application which are made available for use by other systems in the enterprise. The capabilities exposed through a service can range from a simple data look-up or calculation such as a credit check up to complex business processes such as an order fulfilment process in an ERP system.
What has become apparent is that for many organisations adopting SOA, reuse rates have turned out to be surprisingly low – reported as less than 30% in many cases. This failure undermines the business case for SOA initiatives. But if they choose to slow down or abandon their SOA initiative, organisations are faced with no viable solution to ever increasing demands from business for greater levels of integration constrained by limited budgets.
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