Up and away with SOA: service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a current technology rage. Its goal is to make IT integration faster, more effective and cheaper, while using existing tools.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: It integration

If you hear the letters "SOA"' and think somebody is spelling "soap," odds are that you're in finance and not information technology.

SOA, or service-oriented architecture, is one of the hottest buzzwords in IT today, and it's been gaining traction steadily as an open industry standard that vendors are anxious to incorporate into their applications. It's an integration framework that offers a series of benefits: it helps applications talk to each other; it simplifies integration of disparate systems after a merger; and it saves (or even eliminates) a lot of programming time and costs.

"Can you imagine the VP of finance saying, 'We don't have to scrap everything. Let's take our capabilities and integrate them, and allow the various applications to talk to each other,'" says Suzanne Fortman, marketing manager for Cincom Smalltalk, a software development suite offering features that facilitate SOA. Smalltalk was created by Cincinnati-based Cincom Systems Inc., a provider of business process application development products.

One way to think of SOA is as a kind of integration "glue." In a white paper developed by Pervasive Software, SOA services are described as "self-contained, reusable, application-based units of work.... They can include business functions, transactions or system service functions. Examples might be Show Balance, Check Inventory, Place Order or Receive Shipment."

It's common for vendors in the space to use terms such as "tiers" and "layers." Robert Hamer, chairman and CEO of Primitive Logic, a San Francisco-based business services technology provider, says that tiers are what users see, often expressed in terms of business services, such as "authorize payment" or "bill customer;" layers are the components of the architecture that support those services.

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As an architecture that builds off existing technology plumbing--Web Services and Java technology--SOA doesn't require expensive new enterprise software. This means that organizations can build or modify applications quickly, and can reuse the "building blocks" (the services within SOA) to create new applications. SOA "allows you to build standard presentation services across the width of your portfolio," says Hamer.

In contrast, legacy enterprise application integration, or EAI, "lacks the flexibility required to address the two basic integration challenges of variety and change," Pervasive says. "Legacy EAI has not proved to be scalable, economical or...