Why SOA is for real

Hi, I'm Bill Roth, Vice President of product marketing at BEA and I'd like to talk to you today about why SOA is for real. I want to take you into a real world example, but before I do, let's establish a bit of history.

Back in the 80s and early 90s, people were building applications to operating systems, but that was chaos because applications wouldn't move between operating systems. Then Java came around, and that allows us to establish an application infrastructure where you could write applications and it didn't matter what you were running on. That allowed people to write ERP application, CRM, Order Management. The problem now is that, I believe, 3 of every 4 IT dollars is being spent gluing these applications together and that's a problem.

How can we solve that problem? Service infrastructure. What is a service infrastructure? There are 3 pieces to it. First, there is message services, there is data services, and then there is security services. This is the "what" of service oriented infrastructure.

Let me now give you the "how" as an example that SOA is for real. So assume that you go to the hospital, you've broken your leg or something. The hospital knows about you in multiple databases. They may know about your prescriptions in one database. They may know about your billing history in another, and they may know about your patient history from a third database. Now data services allows me to take all 3 of these and provide a single view of the patient. It gives me a single patient record. This is a hospital.

Now let's say that you are cured, you go home and the hospital needs to get paid. They need to take this patient record and turn it into something that the insurance company can understand. Now the insurance company knows you as a policy holder and so what needs to happen is your patient record needs to be transformed and then it needs to be routed to the insurance company. This transformation, it transforms from a patient record into this policy holder record that it can understand through transformation, that's how message services are used.

Now you don't have to look very far for examples of what SOA is being used in real life. It's being used in banking, it's being used in manufacturing, it's being used in financial services broadly and it's being used today and that's why SOA is for real.