Tuesday, August 17, 2010

“Service Reuse” in a SOA – What does this mean ?

One of the great promises of a SOA is the ability to ‘reuse’ services; but what does this mean ?


If you refer to ‘What is a service’ you will see that in many ways, IT Services may be equated to standard things that you may do in your business such as issuing an invoice. The issuing of the invoice is an internal service within your organization that happens when a transaction is executed with a customer such as when a widget is sold.


Consider the situation whereby a new widget, let’s call it ‘widgetx’ is now available to be sold by your organization. This requires a small change to the invoicing process. You are unlikely to bring in a new resource and process to process this new invoicing requirement; you will reuse the existing resources you have and adapt the process (if necessary) to handle the new requirement. You ‘reuse’ your internal ‘service’ in order to make better use of resources, save money and streamline your organization.


In the IT world in the past, service reuse occurred somewhat rarely if at all and thus instead of reusing existing IT services, a new service was introduced equating to a new resource and process in the previous example. This added cost and complexity which multiplied exponentially as IT services were not reused and raised major integration problems between departments in an organization or between organizations.


A standards based SOA enables IT services to be reused in much the same way as the invoice example above. It enables easy reuse of existing IT services to provide extra processing for new requirements. It also enables the controlled updating of the IT service when necessary to handle additional requirements to avoid service duplication resulting in many similar but different services being available. This saves organizations money in the short run by quickly having new IT services up and running and in the long run by ensuring that IT services evolve correctly going forward to support ongoing business requirements.


The SOA Gateway is the perfect tool to help you achieve service reuse.

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