You can’t buy SOA. You can buy tools that may help you get closer to an SOA, but there is no easy, one-off purchase that can make SOA a reality without a lot of work over time,” says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with ZapThink. “You have to start with baby steps, incrementally adapting to SOA and consistently proving the value to the business so it will continue to invest further in SOA.”

According to Schmelzer, a good first step is to take an inventory of proprietary middleware and application interfaces and replace them with standards-based systems and APIs. The goals are to eliminate the application-integration nightmare that haunts a majority of IT shops and to remove redundant components. Adapting the interfaces, with web services or other standards, will hasten the process of making application components work together.

And don’t discount legacy systems. “If you can prove you can make SOA happen on legacy apps, you will have an easier time proving it for new ones,” Schmelzer says.

Read more at: MIS