“Show Me the Money!”

Recently, I was presenting “Building Agile Enterprise Applications” to an audience of developers and one of the them asked me if there were any “best practices” that I would recommend for building SOA applications. Now I do not profess to be any SOA guru, but I would like to share my experience and views on application development and building architecturally rich solutions.

The main objective of a business is to generate profit. In simple accounting terms profit = total revenue – total expenses. So, the lower the cost, the better the probability of profit. In an effort to reduce cost, businesses utilize technology. Therefore, when building software always remember that the objective of technology is to help the business profit.

But technology has its own cost. One of the ways to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of technology is leveraging existing assets. Service Orientation is all about leveraging existing assets while being able to compose them into new applications easily. SOA isn’t a new approach; some of the notions behind SOA have been around for years. However, building SOA applications poses several challenges specifically as it pertains to composing, consuming and managing services. Stay tuned for more blogs on this topic.