Service Component Architecture - Driving Business Agility
A Manager´s Guide to the Business Benefits of Service Components.
Executive Summary
These are challenging times for Chief Information Officers (CIOs). Rapidly shifting business dynamics, together with a mandate to "do more with existing assets", are forcing businesses to scrutinize each aspect of their IT infrastructure. At a business level, enterprise-wide co-ordination of projects, proper organization and aggressive negotiation with integration vendors can yield some savings. The highest gains can be achieved, however, by addressing the architecture-level problems at both an application and infrastructure level that undermine the efficiencies and scalability of current integration solutions.
Service Component Architecture - the process of developing applications as a collection of modular service components (software modules that implement service - as opposed to technical - semantics) is a new paradigm in the development of integration solutions. SCA applications can be modified, managed and changed with little or no programmer intervention, making the SCA approach significantly more attractive for the deployment of business systems in comparison with traditional monolithic application design.
In an era of doing more with less, the SCA enables the next wave of modular, comprehensive and affordable solutions that the next generation of flexible integration solutions while enhancing reuse of existing software assets within an enterprise. It offers a new alternative that protects current investments and offers a migratory path to the next wave of integration solutions (low risk/high return) as discussed in this document.