SOA - is a design concept for IT architectures that provides a way to represent all software used by a business as a service.
SOA restructures software so that it may better serve business needs by converting existing software from industry-specific and hard-to-use proprietary applications to cost-effective, re-usable services that are vendor-independent, applicable to any industry, and are based on open standards technologies.
SOA represents a culture shift in the way businesses employ technology and work together, and it is recognized as having the potential to radically improve the responsiveness of both business and IT organizations alike.
The primary reason that SOA succeeds as a means to provide business agility, where other IT initiatives have failed, is that SOA does not require armies of software developers or consultants. SOA has the potential to remove technology as an obstacle to business flexibility, and provide the means to harness business process-specific, culture-specific, domain expertise in the development of new business services.
As the SOA space matures, IT developments within an organization will become less and less reliant on traditional software consultants and corporate IT professionals, and more reliant on the people who have strong knowledge and background in industry domains, such as business and data analysts, or people in non-IT technical areas. SOA has the potential to effectively provide these people with the software tools to maximize their specialised knowledge of specific business processes or requirements.
Anaylsts and reserach firms have acknowledged the importance of this non-developer role in the creation of effective SOA infrastructures, and recognised that the SOA business analyst will become a very important hybrid between IT and the business.
In traditional project execution a business analyst can act as a conduit between business requirements and IT deliverables. Business analysts capture the specific needs of a service, and communicate these to IT personnel through business and functional requirements documentation, and extensive knowledge transfer and review. Business analysts, and non-technical domain experts, are not traditionally XML-savvy, but do understand document formats, data constructs and service flows necessary to define a service.
The SOBASuite toolset hides the complexity of XML and WSDL from users such as these, but allow them use their domain data formats and service understanding to create advanced WSDL definitions and application code, which can then be used directly by IT personnel within a SOA-based architecture.
Simply put, this product allows business and data analysts, consultants, and even non-SOA IT developers, contribute more to SOA-based project design and development phases, and allows organisations better utilise existing resources and in-house expertise.
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