Today’s companies face a broad array of challenges, including an overabundance of business systems, such as ERP, portals, and a plethora of customized systems lacking a single view of enterprise. As a result, business processes are fragmented over multiple products. Frequently, data is duplicated and inconsistent. When combined with rigid infrastructures, interactions are inefficient and processing is slow. These problems rise exponentially when multiple locations and complex information interactions are spread across different systems. A majority of big IT players like Satyam have therefore taken the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) route. As companies move to adopt this route, their application development services are bound to change drastically. In fact, it promises to transform the basic definitions of "application" and "development" themselves as a result of SOA's promise to shift the responsibility of application testing and the consequent development into the hands of the business user. It's crucial, therefore, for developers, business users of information technology (IT), and the consultants that serve them to understand the changing nature of application development services and the process for creating and managing them in this context. This practice helps in addressing issues, simplifying and streamlining complex interactions, and enables organizations to focus on profitable growth, rather than system integration and maintenance. Moreover the consistent application testing further guarantees the smooth functioning of each of the processes. The SOA context mandates a form of application generally known as a composite application. Composite applications consist of services orchestrated or otherwise combined into service oriented processes, which are in turn exposed as services. The formation of application development services therefore involves configuring such processes. Most composite application developers are business users who work with tools that enable the configuration of metadata, thus enabling them to create and manage business logic declaratively rather than programmatically above the services layer of abstraction that SOA provides. Come to think of it, implementing SOA isn't traditional systems engineering (TSE) at all, but rather a fundamentally different approach to dealing with complexity in the IT environment. Needless to say, this realization is an especially big wakeup call for people with TSE backgrounds! Essentially, with SOA we're building for change, while with TSE, we're building for stability. The problem with stability, of course, is it only takes the business so far -- if the organization requires business agility, then they're much better off implementing SOA.
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