Business processes integrate systems, partners, and people to achieve key
strategic and operations objectives. Examples of business processes include
getting and filling orders, processing invoices, reconciling shipping notices
and received goods and processing insurance claims and loan applications. The
Holy Grail of enterprise computing is adaptive business processes that can be
defined, refined, and optimized to respond to changing business environments,
government regulations and competitive pressures. This vision has followed us
through the evolution of mainframes, Management Information Systems (MIS),
packaged applications, J2EE-based application platforms, business process
management systems (BPMS) and now, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). We
are getting the... (more)
Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are
the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the
right direction to start delivering on this promise. SOAs (service-oriented
architectures) promise to enable businesses to align their business processes
to customer needs, and optimize them to improve customer responsiveness and
drive effic... (more)
LibGo Travel, one of the largest privately held travel companies in the U.S.,
provides vacation packages through its retail stores and wholesale
distribution channels to consumers, partners, travel agents, and stores. The
company wanted to expand its offerings by adding dynamic, branded, and
personalized packages. To help execute this idea, LibGo had to bring together
our travel partners... (more)
Service-Oriented Architectures offer a number of potential benefits: They can
provide new opportunities to connect enterprises with customers, partners,
and suppliers; improve efficiency through greater reuse of services across
the enterprise; and offer greater flexibility by breaking down IT silos. But
these benefits make security more critical than ever. Why? Services are
highly distri... (more)
However, most of the organizations we've worked with are taking a
project-driven approach to SOA - namely, addressing tactical integration and
composite application requirements with SOA tools. So where does this leave
them? Fortunately, companies don't necessarily have to do SOA for the same
reasons, or do enterprise SOA. Each of us can do SOA in our own way and still
benefit from it.
... (more)