Leveraging SOA for maximizing returns from existing infrastructure investments

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Must Read Whitepapers & Case Studies

• Enabling Agile and Intelligent Businesses

  Oracle SOA Suite 11g is a significant step forward toward empowering enterprises across the chasm to the next generation business applications that is powered by a platform delivering rapid composition, comprehensive lifecycle management, customizability, and easy upgrades.

• What's New in SOA Suite 11g?

  Over the years, the tools to implement SOA have become more and more capable, sometimes at the price of complexity. In this new release of SOA Suite, Oracle continues to emphasize the development, management and monitoring of service-oriented architectures, while delivering the extreme performance & scalability required for mission-critical environments.

• SOA Strategy: A Comprehensive Yet Flexible Suite for a Pervasive Architecture

  Software-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is on the mind of nearly every business today, especially those that rely heavily on the Web for customer interaction. When SOA is properly implemented, businesses can respond relatively quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions and re-use resources in new and innovative ways. That's why it is so critical that the roadmap to SOA be realistic, cost-effective and planned in a way that anticipates both business and organizational opportunities and challenges to come. No single SOA component can fulfill the promise of SOA. Instead, a suite of SOA components must be used to create the ideal, agile business environment that every organization dreams of having.

• A Revolution in Agility: Business Integration Through Service Oriented Architecture

  In today's rapidly changing business environment, organizations of all types face one common and persistent challenge: how to become—and remain—agile enough to satisfy ever-increasing customer expectations and accommodate new compliance mandates, all while staying ahead of the competition. The solution is building business based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles.

• SOA Maturity Model: Guiding and Accelerating SOA Success

  To successfully adopt SOA, a company must create a plan that addresses the full extent of the changes required for SOA. For the past five years Oracle has been working with a wide variety of companies that are in various stages of SOA adoption. This experience has been captured in the Oracle SOA Maturity Model such that this collective experience can be used to measure the progress of an SOA initiative and, more importantly, can identify specific capabilities that are lacking or lagging and are therefore inhibiting the SOA initiative. This paper outlines the Oracle SOA Maturity Model and explains how the model is used to accelerate SOA adoption by identifying specific capabilities that are either completely lacking or which are lagging with respect to the other capabilities necessary for successful SOA adoption.

• Get Serious About SOA Governance: A Five-Step Action Plan for Architects

  Whether your organization's service-oriented architecture (SOA) has 50 services being used by one customer, or 50 customers using one service, you need SOA governance; increased business agility depends on it. SOA governance provides the ability to quickly and continuously translate and transmit business strategy and requirements into the processes, policies, and controls that will guide the evolution of your infrastructure and your enterpr

• Right from the Start: SOA Lifestyle Governance

  Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) promise unlimited agility and organizational flexibility. However, achieving these benefits is entirely contingent upon the ability to effectively manage the SOA environment across the enterprise. This paper presents an overview of strategies and practices for governing the transformation to, and the evolution of, SOA. In particular, it explores the role of governance throughout the SOA lifecycle as well as the technology enablers that help organizations develop and maintain an SOA that delivers measurable, sustainable business value.

• SOA Centers of Excellence: Preserving Order Amid Change

  There is only one good way to approach the adoption and facilitation of SOA and Web services, and that is to establish, right from the beginning, a corporate Center of Excellence to guide the revolution from making a compelling business case to putting in place a long-term solution for measuring and improving on every success.

• SOA Best Practices and Design Patterns: Key to Successful Service Oriented Architecture Implementation

  White paper exploring best practices for SOA. There is no question that the successful implementation of Service]Oriented Architecture (SOA) relies on a careful and holistic approach to business planning. One of the most important tools in the evaluation, purchase, and ongoing use of SOA is the body of best practices that vendors, consultants, and customers have compiled. The promise of business agility, improved customer service, and competitive advantage with SOA is real. What varies most is the time, cost, and ease of SOA implementation. By learning from the experiences of those organizations that have been through the process and looking at the standard best practices of large]scale technology implementations, success can come earlier and more dramatically.

• Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle BPEL Process Manager

  The true value of SOA is unlocked when services are leveraged for process orchestration to deliver automation of business processes. Industry's leading process orchestration engine, the Oracle BPEL Process Manager supports a 100% standard approach to orchestrating systems and services into end-to-end process flows

• Application Upgrades and Service Oriented Architecture

  In a recent Forrester study, upgrades made the top concerns list of ERP customers together with Improving Integrations and Shifting the Process Orientation. This is not surprising, given that Applications upgrades are prone to cost overruns, delays and unexpected outages. Maintenance costs, for major point releases as well as more frequent patches, is a topic that catches the attention of most ERP and CRM customers. A study by SOA Industry Analyst Zapthink shows that maintenance and change costs of SOA-based integrations, architected properly, are dramatically lower than traditional integration approaches. Read this whitepaper to understand why and how SOA-enablement will reduce cost and risk of Application upgrades for your organization.

• Oracle IT Modernization: The Path to SOA

  "More and more organizations are looking to service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the basis of their future computer architecture. Recognizing that legacy application design and implementation approaches have led to applications that are costly to operate and maintain, hard to change, and rely on a dwindling set of skills, organizations are hoping that SOA provides a key component of the answer to these problems.

  At the same time organizations are asking three important questions:

  • Since I hear different things, what exactly is SOA, anyway?
  • If I use it, how is it going to help my organization eliminate cost, increase agility, deal with dwindling legacy skill sets, and address compliance?
  • Given that it has value, how do I get there?

  This white paper, part of the Oracle IT Modernization Series, addresses all three of these questions. "

• BPM SOA and Web 2.0: Business Transformation or Train Wreck?

  The challenges faced by today's government agencies and commercial operations are many and varied—and to stay afloat, these organizations must not only promote change from within, but they must also be agile enough to quickly adapt to evolving markets, policies, regulations, and business models. Fortunately for them, the convergence of a trio of technologies and business practices—business process management (BPM), service-oriented architecture (SOA), and Web 2.0—is providing a solution.

• State of Business Process Management Market 2008

  Over the last few years, BPM has seen rapid growth because it succeeds where earlier approaches have failed -— uniting business strategists and technologists together with a shared set of tools to accomplish common goals. The future promises even more explosive growth as BPM products continue to mature, early success stories are shared, and enterprise-class vendors bring stability and scale to the market.

• The Instantly Responsive Enterprise: Integrating Business Process Management and Complex Event Processing

  Read this white paper for an explanation of how business process management melds with complex event processing. The combination nets intelligent business processes that react to changing business conditions in real time, providing continuous visibility-in short, an instantly responsive enterprise.

• Oracle Empowers Business Process Excellence Through Business and IT Collaboration

  Oracle's unique offerings make it the vendor of choice to deliver complete solutions to companies ready to capitalize on the synergies between IT and the business that are only available through interaction and collaboration and that enable the foundation for strategic business transformation.

• Building Flexible Enterprise Processes Using Oracle Business Rules and BPEL Process Manager

  Efficient business processes are one of the main competitive differentiators for any successful company. These processes orchestrate interactions between systems, services, people and partners to achieve key strategic and operational objectives. The definition and flawless execution of business processes enable an organization to provide quality products and services, reduce costs, improve customer service and react quickly to changing market conditions

• Rule Enabling Applications With Oracle Business Rules

  Business decisions and the rules that drive them is key to business change and growth. This paper will explore how business rules are developed and how Oracle Business Rules rules enable additional application functionality for applications during the application development lifecycle.

• Oracle Business Rules: Technical Overview

  There is an increasing desire among business users to get into the driver seat for defining how the business is run. Moreover, regulatory constraints are increasingly demanding that businesses have transparency and consistency in their decision making, and that they are able to certify compliance. Business Rules technology has emerged as the solution for addressing these requirements and Oracle Business Rules is a leading edge Business Rules product. This paper describes how Oracle Business Rules delivers on the promise of agility and enables its customer to change their business processes as well as other decisions rapidly, flexibly, and with confidence.

• 2-Layer BPM: Oracle's Unique Strategy Towards Exceptional Agility and Business Process Efficiencies

  The more configurable business processes are, the more agile the organization. A new approach to Business Process Management (BPM) is the use of BPM and SOA together in a layering strategy. This unique approach is based on context and content and offers organizations improved agility, increased productivity and time-to-market. This white paper explores the BPM layered concept and offers a case study of how ABN AMRO, one of the world's largest financial institutions, has benefited from its deployment.

• Increasing Return on Investment with Data

  This white paper will address data services implementation and the role of Oracle Data Service Integrator in that process. It will describe the technical benefits of a data services implementation within the context of initiatives to promote business process management (BPM), service-oriented architecture (SOA), portal projects, and business intelligence (BI).

• State of the Data Integration Market

  Data integration is a critical and fundamental element in a variety of technologies, including data warehouses, business intelligence (BI) applications, service-oriented architectures (SOA), master data management (MDM) applications, and data-centric architectures. This white paper reviews the state of the market for data integration for 2008 and 2009. It defines data integration, discusses the trends in the data integration market, and provides lessons learned from real implementations. The information presented is based on the State of the Data Integration Market Survey, a study of more than 300 global data integration users conducted by Oracle in August 2008. It also incorporates industry research and projections by leading analyst firms.

• Enterprise Data Services in SOA using ODI Suite

  When properly architected and executed, Data Services can provide the missing link that unifies conventional data systems with the emerging SOA paradigm. By offering a decoupled data facade and an easily virtualized API, Data Services can give SOA the opportunity to establish system control without always forcing enterprise data through an inefficient XML layer

• Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition A Technical Overview

  Integrating data and applications throughout the enterprise and presenting them in a unified view is a complex proposition. Not only are there broad disparities in technologies, data structures, and application functionality, but there are also fundamental differences in integration architectures. Many organizations address these diverse needs with a broad palette of tools and technologies, resulting in disjointed integration projects with no leverage or unity between them. This white paper provides a technical overview of a data integration tool that meets the performance, flexibility, productivity, modularity and hot-pluggability requirements of an integration platform.

• The Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition Architecture

  Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition is built on several components all working together around a centralized metadata repository. These components — graphical modules, runtime components, and a Web interface — in conjunction with other advanced features, make ODI-EE a lightweight, legacy-free, state-of-the-art integration platform. Read this technical brief to learn more about the Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition architecture in detail.

• Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition Executive Overview

  Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition (ODI-EE), a key component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, provides a strong and reliable integration platform for your IT infrastructure. Read this paper for five key reasons why choosing ODI-EE may end up being one of the smartest decisions you make for your company.