The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.5. Finally, We Are Talking to Each Other

Since the introduction of the Internet, no other technology has advanced communication between disparate, heterogeneous applications and systems as SOAs have. Before the Internet, computers in different parts of the world, or even the same room, could not easily communicate with each other.

But with the advent of the Internet, computers were, for the first time, able to identify each other and transmit data to one another. However, there was still a communication barrier: machines on different systems and applications still could not easily communicate with each other since there was no common protocol for message payloads. SOA and SOAP changed this.

SOAP, whose name originally derived from "Simple Object Access Protocol," is a way for defining the structure of objects that are passed between different programs.

Through the use of SOAP and Web services, SOA allows any computer to exchange messages with any other computer, regardless of platform, language, or development environment.

In much the same way that the Internet opened new avenues for the broad Internet, SOA has provided completely new possibilities for the communication between disparate systems. Interestingly, many of these opportunities have a very fortunate side effect: they can ultimately save businesses millions of dollars through asset reuse and business process orchestration.