When a business cuts across country boundaries through expansion, acquisitions, and mergers, its IT infrastructure expands geographically. Interconnecting systems, resources, and applications among various business groups and partners become imperative as fallout of the enterprise's inability to maintain all its systems under one roof. Developmental efforts are also becoming increasingly scattered, in line with outsourcing and offshore development strategies.

All these integration issues can be effectively addressed only by means of distributing applications across the network, and probably across the globe,

Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Services-oriented architecture and Web services-related technologies such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI are becoming increasingly popular in the international community, and the means of exploiting them are being debated seriously.

Web services introduce lots of flexibility and adaptability. Their strengths lie in exposing different disparate systems to each other by using common protocols, registries, and business interfaces to make collaborative computing a reality. SOA also enables a company to publish its core application features onto the World Wide Web for the discovery, integration, and use of other business vendors and consumers.

Adopting SOA includes the challenges of real-time electronic transactions (which we already discussed), plus an intelligent and collaborative environment that pervades various systems, applications, and resources.

Need to Adopt Common Standards and Strategies

To collaborate, collect, and unify development efforts, enterprises need to adopt certain common IT strategies and a standard environment for developing and deploying applications. These standards should be flexible enough to suit the existing environment, and at the same time provide room for future development and expansion.

These strategies should specifically cover the following:

• Standard middleware architecture and technology that is most suitable for the existing organizational infrastructure
• Standard application development environments (IDE) for developing and deploying various applications
• Enterprise-wide data exchange models and data-warehouse standards
• Integration methodologies and migration paths for existing back-office applications
• Inter-organizational services and external services

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