Atos Consulting Look Out | Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA ) and Business Process Management (BPM)

Concept

SOA is about service-enabling business as well as technical architectures, and is an approach to software design.
SOA is characterized by the fact that it is composed of functional units that provide business services. In SOA, a service is an entire repeatable task with a meaning of its own (user authentication, opening of accounts, insurance policy contracts, issuance of purchase orders). It affords re-use, and enables flexibility and agility.
Coarse-grained business functions are exposed as services through well-defined interfaces.
Service providers have no knowledge of the user, but the user has a dependency on the service provider. This allows the quick assembly of different business functions and is described as ‘loose coupling’.
BPM refers to the ability to implement business processes that access services across the organization. SOA architectures enable the development of applications that support corporate processes, allowing a user to define a business process as a defined composition of business activities, each of which is a service provided by SOA.
BPM and SOA may arise as independent initiatives but only with their integration will the maximum benefit of both be achieved.

Trajectory

We will see sharing and re-use, such as provision of the same business application over different channels, to different users at different locations using different devices. Services are a cornerstone of the move towards Web-based composite applications.
Costs reductions will occure when assembling new business processes using new and existing applications.
Development also promotes the re-use of legacy and external applications, normally through service-enablement wrapping.
Makes the topology of applications more visible and easier to understand and manage.
SOA and BPM will improve the business’ ability to react more rapidly to changing business requirements as well as making integration with external partners faster and easier.
In contrast to previous integration mechanisms, SOA is based on generally accepted standards that are supported by practically the entire industry. It does not matter if our base technology supplier is Microsoft, IBM, SUN, or Oracle—all of these support SOA. Services are independent from the technologies that implement them.

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