IBM announced on January 26, 2005, a new service to help companies build capabilities that support business goals, while freeing up currently overstretched IT budgets to focus on growth opportunities. The new Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) is an innovative approach to solving a significant problem, a consistent way for businesses to develop flexible technology that will provide the maximum return back to the business. It helps companies implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA), a standards-based framework that enables enterprises to evolve to on demand businesses that integrate data and applications with customers, partners and suppliers.
What is SOA?
SOA is a concept based on an architectural style that defines an interaction model between three primary parties: the service provider, who publishes a service description and provides the implementation for the service, a service consumer, who can either use the uniform resource identifier (URI) for the service description directly or can find the service description in a service registry and bind and invoke the service
The architecture style defining a SOA describes a set of patterns and guidelines for creating loosely coupled, business-aligned services that, because of the separation of concerns between description, implementation, and binding, provide unprecedented flexibility in responsiveness to new business threats and opportunities. Fig 1 : SOA Reference Architecture
A SOA is an enterprise-scale IT architecture for linking resources on demand. In a SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. You can choreograph these services into composite applications