In the advent of globalization and the rapid growth of organizations, by mergers and vertical integration, the way how businesses manage to orchestrate IT supported and cross organizational processes turns out to be crucial. Overall, every company nowadays needs to guarantee their assets will interoperate in order to prevent the deterioration of its operations.
Beyond interoperability, there is the pressure of cutting costs, excel in Business Process Management and foster innovation, all representing properties of competitive advantage. An organization must stay flexible to customers’, suppliers’ and partners’ needs and serve them on adequate and multiple sales channels. In order to avoid fines and the loss of reputation it must also strive for local and global compliance in various environments.
According to Zimmerli (2009), a Service-Oriented Architecture, SOA in short, is not an IT silver-bullet for business. However, it can significantly assist to leverage enterprise business resources. The strategic goals and business benefits of SOA have been broadly recognized as enablers of competitive advantages:
| Major Business Benefit | Cause, Reason |
|---|---|
| Reduce Capital and Operational Expenditure | Leveraging legacy and existing IT asset; cut labor-hours by reducing service integration costs (documentation, maintenance, creation, etc.) |
| Process Optimization (e.g. Streamline Supply Chain; Product Development; Billing Service; etc.) | No media disruption; integration-centric and automated PBM avoiding individual process errors; orchestration and choreography to streamline/smoothen processes; decrease customer response time. |
| Global Sourcing | Exploit supplier competition; single supplier has less bargaining power. |
| Agility | Cross-organizational interoperability with open standards; low service adaption cost; no vendor-lock-in; no technology lock-in; agility to increase revenue by innovation and reduction time-to-market days. |
| Business Risk Reduction, Controlling enabled | Natural incentives to leverage and govern existing resources; pay-what-you-need; increasing reputation by controlling contingency and assure compliance of data management in particular security; capable of align IT with business. |
ZIMMERLI, Brayan – Business Benefits of SOA [on-line]. University of Applied Science of Northwestern Switzerland: November, 2009. Available at: http://www.brayan.com/
SDB is a proven, reliable and cloud-scalable SOA platform that enables end-to-end service lifecycle management and standards-based integration for mission critical SOA environments. Specifically designed to connect, mediate, and manage interactions between any web-enabled device and heterogeneous services, delivers built-in real time management and monitoring capabilities while supporting integration with any SOA compliant application or service.
Several differentiating aspects of SDB make of it a best choice when comparing to other proposals: