Question

Research a company that uses SOA and Web Services. How does the company integrate those technologies into their information system architecture? What benefits do the technologies provide? What are the challenges? Assess whether the technology is being used appropriately for the company’s purposes.

• Be sure to provide specific examples and evidence supporting your conclusions and defend and support your opinions properly

Answer 1

First of all we have to know about SOA so the SOA is refered to Service Oriented Architecture which is an architectural style for building different software applications which uses the services which are present in the network such as web.

Now, the companies that uses SOA and web series and the benefits which they are getting are-

• eBay- eBay uses SOA to abstract enterprise information from underlying systems.It is a software based integration tier to manage more then two petabytes of data.
• IBM- This company uses Service Oriented Architecture for reducing application inventories.
• Wachivia Bank- This bank uses SOA for bringing IT closer to the business by which the productivity of business increases.
• Cigna- Cigna applied SOA for managing relationship between customers and call centres.
• Massachusetts mutual life insurance- This company uses SOA for various services like distribution management, customer information,etc.

The SOA is an environment for the use of various services. The web service implement various technologies like XML, WSDL(Web Services Description Language), SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol),universal description discovery and integration(UDDI). These are the various technologies in SOA which are used by various company like the ebay is using SOA to drive developers to make money around the ebay platform which will increase the customers in ebay. It provides service to the various company like cigna, etc.

Challenges faced by company for using SOA and web services-

• Quality of services(QOS).
• Availability.
• security.
• reliability.
• Cost.

These are the main challenges faced by companies by using SOA and web series.

Example- The eBay use the SOA services for abstracting required information to increase it's customer on the eBay platform. The another one is IBM which is using SOA to reduce application inventories by which the inventory got reduced from 16000 to 4000 in 1998.