Toward an on demand service-oriented architecture

TLDR

On‑demand e‑business success depends on merging business processes, applications, and IT infrastructure into a cohesive architecture, typically described as a service‑oriented architecture (SOA) that has historically focused on dynamic service reconfiguration but offers limited coverage of comprehensive IT infrastructure enablement from a business‑policy perspective. The paper proposes an extended SOA—termed on‑demand SOA—that integrates business process transformation with service‑oriented development and policy‑based IT management. The authors illustrate the approach with a financial services “Life Change” scenario featuring distributed transactions and stateless high‑performance computing applications.

Abstract

The success of an on demand e-business requires that business process, application, and information technology (IT) infrastructure integration merge into a comprehensive and cohesive architecture, where business process transformation drives service-oriented development and on demand enterprise computing. This enabling architecture is often described as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and is a prerequisite accelerator for on demand solutions. The primary focus of SOA has been on dynamic reconfiguration of services from defined business processes, and on developing business services based on Web services and, more recently, grid services. Current descriptions of SOA are less focused on overall IT infrastructure enablement, both from a business policy perspective and within the context of service-oriented development. In this paper, we extend the current thinking on SOA to include a more comprehensive integration of business process transformation and the enabling technologies of service-oriented development and policy-based IT management. We call this extension on demand SOA. We develop these concepts by using an existing scenario: a financial services sector "Life Change" business process scenario, which involves distributed and disjoint transactions as well as stateless high-performance computing (HPC) applications.