Product Description
Key Findings:

• Service-oriented architectures built upon open, standards-based Web Services provide a strategic IT direction businesses need to meet their fundamental business goal: agility.
• By 2010, ZapThink expects 69% of the total enterprise software market to be Service-oriented.
• The overall market for products and services that support Service orientation will be over $98 billion by 2010.
• Reworking existing brittle, high-cost IT infrastructures into flexible, Service-oriented architectures promises substantial long-term cost savings and revenue opportunities through increased business agility.
• Service orientation represents the latest distributed computing approach to affect IT — the fourth major shift since the mid-twentieth century.
• ZapThink predicts that companies will begin to accept Service orientation in 2003, and it will become the dominant distributed computing approach by 2006.

Table of Contents:

• I. Report Scope
• II. Context for Service-Oriented Architectures
  • 2.1. What is a Service-Oriented Architecture?
    • 2.1.1. Evolution of Distributed Computing
  • 2.2. Business Motivations for SOAs
    • 2.2.1. The Economics of Business Agility
• III. Foundations of SOA
  • 3.1. SOA Foundation: Model-Driven Architecture
  • 3.2. SOA Foundation: Agile Methodologies
  • 3.3. The SOA Metamodel
  • 3.4. The 4+1 View Model of SOA
• IV. Best Practices of SOA
  • 4.1. Develop a top-down, extended enterprise SOA
  • 4.2. Build & maintain a platform independent Service model
  • 4.3. Maintain feedback at all points of the architecture
  • 4.4. Follow Agile Methodology principles & techniques within the context of the Service model
  • 4.5. Encapsulate existing/legacy functionality
  • 4.6. Embrace heterogeneity/follow a federation model of software
  • 4.7. Compose atomic Services into coarse-grained business Services
  • 4.8. Build for consumability/broad applicability
  • 4.9. Perform ad hoc upgrades
  • 4.10. Prioritize SOA transition activities on the fly
• V. Conclusions
  • 5.1. Key Notes
  • 5.2. Decision Points
  • 5.3. Best Practices
  • 5.4. Figures
  • 5.5. Tables
  • VI. Profiled Vendors

SOA Best Practices Report: Beyond Point-to-Point Web Services