| SOA Offering |
Designed For |
Problems at Enterprise Scale |
| Web services management |
Bounded, small Web services projects with few endpoints and little need for reuse |
• Creates silos: Policies are inconsistent from project to project, or even from developer to developer.
• No separation of concerns: Policy decision-making placed in the hands of individual developers.
• Unable to scale: Agents or proxies "live at the endpoints," causing administrative burden at scale.
• Invasive: Requires the deployment of agents on every service provider platform. |
| Enterprise Service Bus |
Mid-sized service-oriented integration environments, within a defined span of control that can tolerate heavyweight, adapter-based solutions |
• Heavyweight: Requires every service interaction to traverse heavyweight messaging middleware.
• Messaging only: Lack policy frameworks, focused only on messaging.
• Inefficient at scale: Hub-and-spoke model forces messages to travel great distance to get to destination.
• Adapter model: Any service wishing to traverse the bus must be translated into Java Message Service (JMS) or other format before it can be routed. |
| Application platform suite |
Departmental Web services projects sharing a common application platform |
• No control: Lack any service or policy management, so everything needs to be hard-coded into endpoints.
• Encourages chaos: Difficult to enforce consistency from endpoint to endpoint.
• Limited reuse: Lacks governance framework for reuse.
• Platform-bound: Locks customer into specific application server. |
| Packaged, pre-integrated SOA processes |
Web service-driven extensions to existing packaged application solutions |
• No loose coupling: Services incorporated rigidly for limited, single purpose.
• No service sharing: Services designed for single process extension; no attempt at reuse.
• Limited standards compliance: Only designed to extend applicability of an existing packaged application.
• Vendor lock-in: Approach further locks customer into packaged application vendor. |