The Need for a New Enterprise Architecture
The information technology solutions that many organizations have implement over the past decades are no longer adequate to meet contemporary business needs. In today's economy, the global marketplace requires businesses to operate with greater agility, competitiveness, and productivity, at lower cost than ever before—because now their competitors come from every corner of the globe. Technological advances that one company overlooks will be adopted by another and used to their advantage.
As a result, companies must quickly recognize and respond to new opportunities and challenges and growing global competition. We need to respond to customer requirements more quickly and precisely—and to offer tailored responses to the distinctive needs of various customers. Enhancing efficiency and productivity requires faster access to deeper, more accurate, and more timely information for better decision-making. As companies respond to their challenges by setting up virtual supply chains that bring more global partners and vendors into their core business, they need ways to seamlessly integrate with those partners and vendors.
Many IT environments aren't up to the challenge. Their systems are inflexible, incapable of quickly adapting to new business or regulatory requirements. Too many systems are complex, proprietary, and siloed, making customization and integration difficult. The inability to share existing application components increases the time and cost to develop, test, deploy, and maintain new solutions. As a result, too many resources are tied down with fixing, maintaining, and attempting to integrate existing solutions, rather than investing in innovative solutions to new business needs. The IT department, which needs to be a strategic asset to the company, is too often a cost center instead of an innovation center.
Fortunately, trends have been moving in a more productive direction. Technologies like extensible markup language (XML) and simple object access protocol (SOAP) enable new ways to integrate systems. Legacy investments may now integrate with new solutions across platforms, departments, geographic boundaries—even across enterprises
Together, these developments provide the foundation to solve the problems facing business and IT: service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
Nirvana's SOA Point of View
