Drivers for services
The international insurance company wanted to re-use OrderService. Reuse is not the goal here, but the means to an end: cost-reduction or faster time-to-market. The following are drivers for SOA and services:
Flexibility: Services are small building blocks with a limited and clear set of capabilities. That means it is easier to support the changing requirements of your organization. Your IT landscape is more modular, preventing domino effects for changes in software.
Standardization: Services are frequently provided using open standards thereby hiding the underlying technical complexity and details. This makes the consumers and the organization as whole more vendor-independent. A consumer can still use a service, even if it is provided by another system as long as it uses the same interface. Almost all large vendors support open standards such as REST, SOAP, WSDL, WS-*, XML, and so on.
Cost reduction: Reusing a service is cheaper than building, maintaining, and hosting...
