What does SOA mean? Web services and middleware can help you build a SOA. Business process tools can help you take advantage of a SOA. But none of these technologies answer the question, because SOA requires methodology more than technology.
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Capable architects optimise your software estate; they minimise the risks and costs of an SOA initiative
SOA is a paradigm that favours certain design options (is not all things to all people).	A SOA works best where services have most if not all of nine qualities.	Enterprise-scale SOA requires you to address several challenges, some difficult.		The SOA paradigm is independent of other methods and tools you may need.
For example: the service-oriented architect tends to favour prefer messaging to remote invocation protocols and stateless services over distributed objects and	Abstract. Composable. Defined by a contract. Loosely-coupled. Reusable. Autonomous. Discoverable. Stateless. Transactional.	Systematic identification of services. Decomposition and composition of processes to the right level of granularity. Transactionality and roll back of services. Storage and retrieval of process state. Ownership and maintenance of shared services. Versioning strategy. Governance. Avoiding vendor lock in.		A SOA might employ web services, but does not have to. A SOA might support workflow applications; but does to have to. A SOA might support web applications; but does not have to. A SOA might employ OO software or distributed objects, but does not have to.
Capable architects have good reasons to depart from the purest form of the SOA paradigm in specific solution architectures.	Capable architects understand the ambiguities in some of these qualities, and trade offs that have to be made.	Capable architects know the methodology and management challenges.		Capable architects know that for workflow applications, BPM can be added, and that for web applications, the REST paradigm is useful.
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