IT departments see SOA as a way to break down monolithic business applications
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) appears to be all the rage among the information technology network administrators of many large corporations, but how does one begin or get support for such an ambitious initiative?
Vivek Ranadive, the founder, chairman and chief executive at integration specialist Tibco Software, said a compelling reason for adopting SOA was 'to end the architecture for extortion' that had held the heads of companies and their network administrators hostage for more than 20 years.
'The database-oriented architecture in many companies is very rigid; it centralises control and is very expensive to change,' Mr Ranadive said, noting the typically high cost of keeping those software licences and updating them.
He said the situation got worse as companies piled on more business applications, such as enterprise resource planning software, on top that architecture, which meant 'extortion on top of extortion'.
'There is a sea change happening in the industry. Over the next 20 years, data will no longer be controlled in one spot - it will be democratised. Companies will move from a static database-oriented architecture to a dynamic service-oriented architecture,' he said.