NTIS

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural approach to building composite applications from reusable, platform independent services. The resulting composite application draws functionality from multiple internal and external systems. An SOA lets you integrate virtually all your IT resources, turning presumed incompatibility and isolated data into strategic business advantage.

An open source SOA allows organizations to share open source application logic and data among multiple open source applications. Its composite applications are created by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services. These services operate independent of the underlying platform or programming language. The advantages of a SOA system are:

• Application adaptability to changing technologies
• Ease-of-integration among open source software and with legacy or closed source systems
• Ability to leverage closed source application investments while improving agility
• The ease at which reusable business processes can be created and shared throughout the enterprise

We can help with these SOA challenges. The use of open source software is proven at the infrastructure layer, where SOA components exist. There are many open source software (OSS) solutions for SOA that have real benefits over comparative commercial solutions, including:

• OSS eliminates licensing fees as an impediment to adding endpoints to your solution
• OSS inherently avoids vendor lock-in and is required for a heterogeneous system
• OSS excels at standards-based solutions, making integration of infrastructure stack components possible
• OSS solutions are proven within the infrastructure layer

NTIS leverages open source software technologies with a methodology to help organizations deal with the challenges of identifying, creating, and reusing enterprise services and help you to realize the benefits of SOA.

SOA Strategy – NTIS will analyze your SOA practices and current tools and will look for open source alternatives that can enhance your current enterprise architecture goals (e.g., improved functionality, cost reduction, increased flexibility, greater control, and ability to scale).

Product Selection – NTIS will help you choose the most appropriate solution for your unique needs. Starting with NTIS’ recommended SOA solution stacks and leveraging our proven methodology, NTIS determines the components that will provide the closest fit to your unique challenges and where customization, if any, is needed.

Solution Delivery – NTIS will work with your team to finalize your business requirements, understand your integration needs, architect a solution, and implement the solution. NTIS also offers support and maintenance for the solution.

Training on Best Practices – NTIS will help your organization understand how to effectively interact with the SOA open source communities and teach your team about best practices when developing open source.

NTIS has reviewed several open source components at the OS, application server, messaging queue, enterprise service bus, web services, and discovery levels to determine the best OSS SOA solutions available based on many criteria including:

• Feature richness, relevancy, and quality
• Strength of and support from community
• Training and availability of staff
• Maintainability and administration
• Documentation availability and quality
• Support availability
• Maturity
• Professional services availability
• Adoption and key endorsements
• Product integration
• Future roadmap
• Reliability, scalability, and performance
• Usability
• Software development quality
• Licensing model