Editorial from the August 2005 issue of Managing Automation

Six SOA Questions to Answer

by Eric Marks, Contributing Editor

I attended two recent industry events where the topic, of course, was service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, the information that IT and business executives need to begin their SOA initiatives was not divulged by the panelists or the software vendors, causing palpable audience frustration. The vendors all have a SOA angle and, not surprisingly, it revolves around a license sale of their particular software platform. In my mind, there are six broad questions people are asking about SOA and services:

1) How do we get started with SOA?

2) How do we identify the appropriate services for our initial SOA projects?

3) What technologies do we need and when?

4) How do we measure results? What's the ROI?

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