Who Should Read This Book

This book is aimed at the various stakeholders of enterprise software architectures, including software architects and evangelists, designers, analysts, developers, members of IT strategy departments, project managers, representatives of product vendors, and those interested in software architecture and its relation to structures and processes within large-scale organizations. Furthermore, this book is an excellent introduction to the real world of commercial computing for students in a variety of disciplines.

If you are a software architect, this book provides you with hands-on guidelines for the design of SOAs. You will find the definition of an SOA together with its key terms as we distinguish the SOA from approaches such as component architectures and software buses. Furthermore, this book provides concrete guidance for the most important design decisions one will encounter in practice. These guidelines comprise identifying services, assigning the appropriate service type and allocating the ownership of data to services. You will also discover how to utilize expansion stages in order to enable stepwise SOA introduction. This book also provides valuable advice on the design of a functional infrastructure for business processes and on how to achieve process integrity, approach heterogeneity, and initiate the technical infrastructure. We discuss these guidelines with respect to different application types, including Web applications, fat clients, mobile applications, EAI, and multi-channel applications. For the purpose of software architects, Chapters 4 to 10 are most valuable. In addition, Chapter 13, which covers SOA project management, will be helpful in ensuring an efficient collaboration within an SOA project. Finally, the case studies in Part III give you practical examples of how architects in other organizations introduced an SOA.

Do you see yourself in the role of an SOA evangelist? If you intend to implement an SOA within your own organization, you must successfully promote your ideas. Most importantly, you must be able to communicate the benefits of the SOA to all stakeholders of the application landscape within your organization. Chapter 11 will be of special interest to you because it presents the key benefits of SOA for the organization and each individual stakeholder. In addition, Chapter 12 provides an in-depth description of the steps required to set up an SOA, with considerable practice-oriented advice as to the introduction of appropriate processes and boards. After reading this book, you should have a deeper understanding of SOAs, enabling you to effectively argue the benefits to different stakeholders and to establish the necessary processes and boards to make your SOA endeavor a success!

If you are a software designer, analyst, or developer working in an SOA project, although you are likely to work in a specific part of your application landscape, this book will help you obtain a better understanding of the entire process. Furthermore, there are key challenges such as process integrity that directly impact your work. This bookin particular Chapters 7 to 10helps to address these challenges in a coordinated manner within your SOA project.

If you work in the IT strategy department of an large organization, you should read this book in order to find out how SOAs can add to your IT strategy. Your work is likely to be driven by the demand for agility and cost effectiveness. Many enterprises have experienced projects that failed to deliver the required functionality and therefore lost business opportunities. Furthermore, many application landscapes suffer from high maintenance costs for their inherited assets and the integration of new applications. In Part II (Chapters 1113) you will read about the various possibilities for overcoming these issues with an SOA. Finally, several strategies for introducing the SOA within the organization are presented. Part III (Chapters 14 to 17) contains several case studies with real-world evidence that validates the SOA approach. Those success stories provide "living proof" of SOA success and offer an impression of the different ways an SOA can be established.

If you are an experienced project manager, you should read this book in order to understand the specific benefits of SOAs for project management. The SOA approach implies a major simplification of the overall software development process, and this book makes these benefits accessible. However, SOAs will challenge you, and as a result, this book presents solutions to the most important problems one encounters in an SOA project, both from the technical and project management viewpoints. You will find Chapter 13, which focuses on project management, and Chapters 11 and 12, which depict the political environment, to be most beneficial. It should be noted that this book does not introduce a new software development methodology. You will require a sound knowledge of your organization's favorite methodology, accompanied with endurance, social competence, political cleverness, and management skills. This book will complement these skills so that they can be successfully applied in an SOA project.

For a vendor of standard software packages, this book presents valuable guidance for product management and sales. SOAs will soon gain tremendous importance in the enterprise software market. As a salesperson or a product manager, you need to understand the requirements of your enterprise customers in order to be able to offer solutions that fit your customer's needs. In particular, Chapter 11 will be very beneficial because it depicts the benefits of service-oriented software from the viewpoint of the various stakeholders. Being able to offer service-oriented software implies a significant competitive advantage. The inherent strength of SOAs will become the strength of your product. It enables you to sell sophisticated vertical solutions, generating product revenues for your company without the burden of high integration costs that inhibit the sales process.