Tech Talk: What is Service-Oriented Architecture?

One of the more important enhancements to the new InputAccel 6.0 upgrade is its support for Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA.

SOA represents the broad set of best-practices that enable companies to hide the complexity of the underlying technology while at the same time providing an agile set of resources to the business. Put in simple terms, service-orientation takes traditional business applications and functions, and divides them into individual tasks, referred to as services, which can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementations.

Four main characteristics of a service-oriented architecture are:

• It is a component based architecture that deliberately hides complexity wherever possible by adhering to the best practice of separating business logic from computer logic.
• By leveraging standards, independent components are loosely couples, enabling individual services to be added, modified, or deleted with minimal impact on other services. Existing applications can easily be reused with the addition of an adapter.
• Components are orchestrated to link together in composite applications that support business processes and deliver a set of flexible resources at a defined service level.
• As a joint initiative between IT and business, SOA represents the next generation of IT architecture, enabling simple and flexible development of business applications that can leverage existing assets.

SOA provides the foundation for a new kind of business agility, cost-effectively allowing IT to be more responsive to business requirements while improving application development, deployment, and on-going support. InputAccel 6.0 uses Web Services that provide the standards and tools to build an SOA to process work over the internet and enables the InputAccel system to be a consumer or provider of web services.

With it, IT departments can reduce integration expense, increase asset reuse, improve business visibility, enhance business agility, and further mitigate regulatory risk.

To learn more about the new InputAccel 6.0 and what SOA can do for you, click here or dial 1-888-726-7730 to speak with a PaperFree consultant today.