Chapter 2. The Solution

In the previous chapter, you read about the challenges that organizations face in today's fast moving, demanding, and competitive economy. Organizations need to adapt and respond rapidly to customer demands, put new products and services in the market before competitors do, adhere to changing rules and regulations in time, and need to work together with other organizations in changing partnerships. In short, organizations need to be agile. These challenges are hard to solve, even more so because of the frequent misunderstanding between businesses and IT and the problems shared by business and IT such as duplication of data and functionality.

This chapter explains why SOA makes it easier to bridge this gap, making sure IT can deliver what the business needs to be successful by creating a more flexible architecture. The chapter is divided into the following sections:

• What is a service?: The first part explains what services are and discusses some of the important concepts...