Data Integration is Key to Realising the Full Potential of SOA

Overview

One of the reasons why customers have been slow to adopt and reap the benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), is that services are only as effective as the access they have to information spread out across the enterprise. While standards and technologies have matured to help IT organizations turn application logic into services, not enough effort has been spent to ensure that these services have reliable and consistent access to and knowledge of the underlying data they depend on. This has lead to a lack of re-use, increased development time for services, increased complexity, and higher maintenance costs.

The missing piece is a data integration layer that abstracts business logic from the underlying data structures. A data integration layer understands and maintains the location, structure, format, synchronization patterns and cross-reference relationships of the underlying data. It uses this information as a foundation to provide data integration services to reliably access and update the data, greatly increasing productivity and reducing the cost and complexity of building and maintaining business services and thus of implementing an SOA. Furthermore, a data integration layer provides the information and processes to unify data into a single logical view, which can then be stored in an operational data store or data warehouse or accessed via business activity monitoring (BAM) tools for real-time reporting.