Decision Services: The Next SOA Challenge

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an enterprise integration strategy currently enjoying widespread adoption due to its promise of component reuse, flexibility and reduced inherent complexity, and its ability to be deployed alongside existing legacy infrastructure. SOA implements business processes by orchestrating business services that use standard data formats and communication protocols to perform business functions. These services typically fall into two broad categories: data services, those that retrieve, modify and record data; and decision services, those services that perform decisioning that is unrelated to data transformation.