by Colin Robb, Mercury, UK
Few other innovations in IT offer the transformative potential of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), and Gartner estimates that by 2008, 80 percent of IT initiatives will be service-oriented.
The basis of SOA is not new – composite business applications made up of separate, distributed services which can be shared and reused, from internal or external sources – we’ve seen it before in guises such as CORBA. However, it is the adoption of global standards which is driving the current popularity of the SOA approach.