Understanding SOA

Understanding SOA: How Service-Oriented Architecture Can Help You Achieve Your Business Goals

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become the premier solution for helping you, the enterprise, integrate disparate technologies, legacy systems, and new solutions. The key to benefiting from service-oriented architecture is understanding SOA and how to best migrate from your current software infrastructure. Understanding SOA will also help you begin to integrate service-based functionality into your enterprise architecture. Progress Software provides software and technology that will help you build your SOA and achieve the benefit of service-oriented architecture which include agility and reuse.

First of all, SOA is about reuse—it is not about integration. Integration solutions connect existing systems, while an SOA supports connectivity and reuse for the life of the system. In an SOA, IT assets exist as services that can be consumed by any business process without custom work—without vendor lock-in. The hardest part of implementing an SOA is understanding how to get there from where you're at now. But by service-enabling systems one at a time and localizing the work at the endpoint, you can avoid large upfront investments and corporate-wide commitments.

Understanding SOA with Progress Software

Progress Software's unique approach to SOA makes middleware obsolete. We uniquely deliver a distributed SOA infrastructure portfolio because we know that your systems span departments and geographies, and must be fast, secure and always available. By offering solutions that are fully distributed, Progress Software lets you service-enable systems without having to create yet another IT stack—as well as without disrupting or having to expand existing middleware.

Progress solutions service-enable systems with a set of lightweight, intelligent endpoints, rather than deploying integration technology in a centralized server. Understanding the difference between other approaches and Progress' approach is critical—eliminating centralized servers not only drastically reduces hardware, software, development, testing, and maintenance costs, but also increases enterprise agility.

Understanding SOA benefits can lead to reduced overall IT spending by:

• Reducing hardware costs by eliminating a centralized server;
• Reducing software costs by eliminating the need to buy a software stack;
• Accelerating speed to market by reusing existing middleware, so processes can run without disruption;
• Reducing development life cycles to respond to change more quickly.

Because Progress' approach to understanding and deploying SOA allows incremental adoption, organizations can avoid large upfront investments and work with what is already paid for and deployed.

The Progress® SOA Portfolio is comprised of interoperable, best-in-class service infrastructure products used to build, deploy and manage a service-oriented architecture (SOA). From first project to global deployment, our portfolio provides robust, yet agile SOA infrastructure designed for challenging, real-world environments. Over 1000 customers rely on Progress as their independent supplier of reliable, interoperable SOA infrastructure software.

More Resources for Understanding the Value of Open Source SOA

Progress also provides open source solutions for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Understanding that in a free and open marketplace the best ideas will win, the FuseSource product line shares its expertise, ideas, and technology to create and deliver SOA solutions that help our customers succeed. Our approach to open source SOA combines the speed and innovation of open source software with the reliability and expertise of commercially provided enterprise services.

In addition to providing a unique SOA approach that best fits your infrastructure software environment, Progress Software also offers products and solutions for CORBA integration, an integration platform, alternatives to middleware, a SWIFT parser, JBI, enterprise integration, semantic data integration, algorithmic trading and more.