Targeted at management, the first six chapters of Secrets of SOA focus on the business impact of service-oriented architecture technological decisions with an emphasis on cost, flexibility, and the ability to maintain business objectives. Each of the six chapters explores a different topic that illustrates the value of a physically integrated SOA infrastructure organized at the enterprise level. Taken together, they demonstrate why enterprise-level planning, backed by a centralized deployment strategy, is essential to the success of SOA. Aimed at the IT executive, the second half of the book deals with specific IT issues raised by SOAs and why these issues are best dealt with on an enterprise level. Among the topics covered in these eight chapters are virtualizing resources, managing heterogeneous workloads, maintaining data and transactional integrity, and the value of proximity.