Maximize the Business Value of Your SOA

Powerful market forces—globalization, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory compliance, fierce competition, tight operational budgets, and increased customer service demands—are pushing your business to become more agile. Your business needs access to all its data faster than ever before. To help you respond, you’ve built an IT infrastructure based on SOA’s inherent capabilities for flexibility, responsiveness, and reuse.

But is your SOA supplying the data your business needs—when, where, and how it needs it—to stay agile and competitive? Can your SOA handle the complexity of all your data? Are you running up against the limitations of your SOA?

Common SOA Challenges

Rising complexity of data. Your IT organization is handling more data, in more formats, from more partners and systems than ever before. Does your SOA provide a single, comprehensive view into your business-critical information assets? How does your SOA handle the complexity of your data—its volume, latency, and many formats and structures?

Increasing business demands. Timely information fuels all the business initiatives that your SOA was designed to support. But most SOAs don’t handle data as a service. They don’t deal with the real complexity of data. Does your SOA make data available when and how your business needs it—in batch, near real-time, and real-time modes?

Shrinking IT budgets. Every business initiative spawns a new IT project. And each IT project requires data integration. Does your SOA help your IT organization reuse data integration logic and skills across these projects to keep IT costs in check?

Proliferating data quality issues. SOA breaks down barriers between your application silos, but does it fix data quality issues at point of entry? Does your SOA proactively prevent questionable, inconsistent, or inaccurate data from proliferating throughout your business?

Using flexible and reusable services to orchestrate business processes, SOA breaks down barriers between silos of applications. But SOA overlooks the data that fuels these processes.