In this blog I will share with you the two biggest business benefits of SOA. But first let me briefly share my understanding on what is service oriented architecture (SOA). It is the structure that supports the communication between services or essentially it is a collection of services. Moreover, SOA is a vision on how heterogeneous applications will be able to talk to each other. An application’s business logic or individual functions are modularized and presented as services for consumer/client applications. After this concise introduction here are the two biggest business benefits of SOA:
1. Reuse of existing assets – if you think about code reuse, people are speaking about it for a long time. Properly implemented and designed SOA application offer reuse possibilities in heterogeneous environment such as C, C++, Java, .Net. The developers doesn’t have to worry about compiler versions, platforms and other incompatibilities that make code reuse difficult. Most of the companies experience continually evolving business needs but they spend just a petty amount of their time and budget on new applications that can solve these needs. The reason for this absurd is that in most cases this new piece of software will be again created in isolation and the company will have another application that needs to be integrated into the existing infrastructure further increasing the complexity without achieving enough ROI. On the contrary, the reuse of existing services provides additional ROI for the companies that want to implement SOA. In such a way service reuse becomes the “thing” rather than application integration.
2. Quicker time to market – with SOA the company is able to assemble components more easily and in such a way to react faster to the changing market & business conditions. For example, if your company has two different billing systems and there is an application that wants access to them without SOA you have to write two APIs but if SOA is implemented correctly you will write just one API in the service layer and that’s it. Moreover, even if you want to change something in the back end of the billing systems you don’t have to change anything in the applications that are connected to them because they are connected to the service layer and not directly. Thus, you will save costs but most importantly time. We all know how crucial is time nowadays due to the competition in every sector. SOA can really make your company more agile and faster in response to issues, and in releasing new products or services.
In conclusion, if you’re not a dynamic business with lots of change you don’t have to be looking at changing your architecture. I am saying this because it’s not only a lot of energy to go through implementing SOA but being a newer technology there aren’t so many people experienced in it and you’ll be competing with a lot of companies for them. But, if you are operating in a fast, growing, dynamic sector SOA is a must for your organization.
Sources used:
https://www.javaworld.com/article/2071889/soa/what-is-service-oriented-architecture.html
