If I am not live blogging from ARIS ProcessWorld, you can find me at the SOA booth in the exhibition area, where we demo our SOA product. It seems the interest in SOA is growing. Many people are passing by who have read about it and who want to see what’s behind. One common question is about a very short introduction to SOA. So let’s try that here as well…
First, there is no fixed definition for SOA. Many people have many different understandings what Service-oriented Architecture is. In general, there are two major trends to approach the topic. On one hand there is a technical SOA definition focusing on business process automation by orchestrating a set of (web) services to implement the process. In that scenario, an executable process description like BPEL is derived from a business process model like EPC or BPMN. ARIS SOA Architect supports the users here with the automated EPC to BPEL transformation.
The other SOA definition comes from a business perspective. Here, SOA is understood as a management concept for structuring a company. This is a rather new interpretation of SOA, which got more popular in recent years. The different value creating entities of a company are structured into services, which can be combined in a flexible manner to respond to business needs. This SOA definition is independent of IT, so a service doesn’t have to be a web service or any other kind of technology. We support this SOA concept in ARIS SOA Architect with a comprehensive modelling method allowing a clear description of services and the service architecture.
