Service-Oriented Architecture - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 157

7.2 SOA Benefits
SOA delivers the following business benefits:
a. Increased business agility : SOA improves throughput by dramatically
reducing the amount of time required to assemble new business
applications, from existing services and IT assets. SOA also makes
IT significantly easier and less expensive to reconfigure and adapt
services and IT assets to meet new and unanticipated requirements.
Thus, the business adapts quickly to new opportunities and com-
petitive threats, while IT quickly changes existing systems.
b. Better business alignment : As SOA services directly support the ser-
vices that the organization provides to customers.
c. Improved customer satisfaction : As SOA services are independent of
specific technology, they can readily work with an array of customer-
facing systems across all customer touch points that effectively
reduce development time, increase customer engagement time, and,
hence, increase customer solutioning, enabling enhanced customer
satisfaction.
d. Improved ROI of existing assets : SOA dramatically improves the ROI
of existing IT assets by reusing them as services in the SOA by iden-
tifying the key business capabilities of existing systems and using
them as the basis for new services as part of the SOA.
e. Reduced vendor lock-in and switching costs : As SOA is based on loosely
coupled services with well-defined, platform-neutral service con-
tracts, it avoids vendor and technology lock-in at all levels, namely,
application platform and middleware platform.
f. Reduced integration costs : SOA projects can focus on composing, pub-
lishing, and developing Web Services independently of their execu-
tion environments, thus obviating the need to deal with avoidable
complexity. Web Services and XML simplify integration because
they focus on the data being exchanged instead of the underlying
programs and execution environments.
Technical benefits of SOA include the following:
a. More reuse : Service reuse lowers development costs and speed.
b. Efficient development : As services are loosely coupled, SOA promotes
modularity that enables easier and faster development of compos-
ite applications. Once service contracts have been defined, develop-
ers can separately and independently design and implement each
of the various services. Similarly, service requestors too can be