|
Data Integration in a Service-Oriented Architecture - A Strategic Foundation for Maximizing ... |
|
Bert Oosterhof
|
|
Wednesday, 21 November 2007 |
As business and IT managers assess strategies for service-oriented architecture (SOA), it is crucial to recognize the role that data integration plays in enabling an SOA to deliver on its potential. Many early SOA initiatives have focused on high-level application integration that abstracts business logic to more effectively broker processes, messages, and services, and enable cost-effective reusability.
At the granular data level, however, many SOA initiatives leave unresolved the issue of heterogeneous data that varies by format, semantics, and hierarchies among multiple applications. The result can be cost and time overruns to reverse-engineer data integration mechanisms, limitations in the functionality of the SOA, and inconsistent data across the enterprise.
Consider a hypothetical example. Company A had acquired Company Z. To understand the new revenue and customer dynamics of the merged company, the CIO and IT architects designed an SOA-based management reporting system meant to show the top 100 customers across the two entities. That data was stored in disparate legacy applications.
Once the system went live, though, the information was virtually useless. It was full of contradictions, redundancies, and missing data. How did this happen? The reason: the SOA lacked a data integration foundation. With an enterprise data integration platform in the mix, IT could have cleansed the data, resolved conflicting relationships and hierarchies among customer entries, and presented a uniform, accurate view of the top 100 customers from both Company A and Company Z.
This white paper examines how an enterprise data integration platform enriches a serviceoriented architecture, and how an SOA provides an ideal framework for implementing data integration technology across the enterprise. After reading this white paper, you’ll understand:
- The IT and business drivers behind SOA
- The progress made to date and the remaining challenges of SOA
- How to take SOA to the next level with service-oriented data integration
- The anatomy of service-oriented data integration
- Approaches to migrating toward SOA
The convergence of data integration and service-oriented architecture can reduce IT complexity, ensure data consistency, and drive business agility.
[PDF]
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
