Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.19. GET YOUR SOA TOOLS PLATFORM "RIGHT"

This SOA "right" is essential to the realization of your SOA strategy, yet our field experience shows that many organizations implement their SOA technology platforms before they understand their services requirements. When we say get your SOA platform right, we mean making sure your SOA run-time technical platform supports your planned and current services and your target state architecture. Ensure that your SOA platform does not place dependencies or limitations on your services. Understand the tradeoffs of investing in various SOA platform elements such as service registries, enterprise service buses (ESBs), Web services management tools, and SOA security solutions.

Many organizations invested prematurely in UDDI service registries before they had any services available, or even an SOA strategy and roadmap to guide their investment decisions. Similarly, before buying an enterprise service bus, make sure you really need one. Perhaps your organization's messaging and integration requirements can be addressed by Web services management (WSM) solutions or other alternatives. Most likely, you will end up with both solutions anyway, but if you are budget-challenged and can only implement one or the other, understand what you are buying with your SOA platform investments. Below are a few guidelines to consider as you try to get your SOA platform right:

• Services-Driven Platform Selection. Select your SOA platform based on the requirements of ...