Now that GFC is coming to an end many businesses all around the world are planning to invest more into their information systems to make them much more resilient to unforeseen change circumstances.

There was a lot of hype couple of years about SOA and how every business should be looking into SOA if they want to move ahead. GFC although changed all that and then companies started to talk more and more about cutting in spending and consolidating what they have.

So what exactly is SOA ? Why is it so important for an average business and what benefits does it bring for them.

First and foremost, SOA is not a technology.. it is not something that you can buy off the shelf. Having said that I know that there are lot of vendors who position there products as SOA-fying your business.

SOA in my opinion is advances in application architecture and not technology. It is basically changing your applications from brittle, hardwired silos to something that can be reusable and shared by business, applications and your partners.

This behaviour also enables Business agility and Innovation as more than one component can possibly be combined to create a product offering which was not possible earlier.

Many people argue that just by reuse of business logic we can be successful SOA rollout – Yes and No

Yes you do promote reuse of business components or smart bits but look at it from big picture prospective – how is it going to evolve over coming years. SOA also brings its own set of challenges and if you are preparing to head down the path of SOA you should be ready for it.

Things like, SOA governance - how would you rollout updates, what should be the level of service granularity and also how would you manage dependencies.

In my opinion there’s lot more to consider when planning SOA than what people normally discuss. I have been part of many discussions where technology takes the centre piece of how SOA should be implemented but I still think that there’s lot more to SOA than just simply selecting technology A, B or C.