To stay competitive in today’s business environment, organizations must increase their technological agility and decrease operational costs. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can play a vital role towards achieving these objectives. For smart companies looking to gain competitive advantage through SOA, the Oracle Fusion Middleware provides a solid head start. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), a flexible, modular approach to delivering IT services, is an essential foundation for cloud. Organizations that do not deploy SOA and attempt to take advantage of the cloud will face a serious risk of being outperformed by their competitors who do.

SOA addresses many of today’s challenges and provides significant advantages over current IT architecture. SOA lowers costs and improves agility allowing organizations to respond to the increasing rate of change occurring in businesses around the world.

The question isn’t when to adopt SOA and prepare for the cloud, but how. The answer is to prepare a roadmap to SOA and the cloud now to create competitive advantage in the future.

Enterprise SOA (ESOA) is a business-driven software architecture that harnesses the true capabilities of Web services to address even the most complex enterprise requirements. If implemented correctly, ESOA can greatly increase adaptability, flexibility, openness and cost efficiencies in an organization.

Together, YZSquare and SAP help enterprises quickly assemble the building blocks of SOA to enable easy creation and use of business processes as “services.” These services can effectively communicate business logic between software applications running on disparate platforms. Thus, IT can respond quickly to changing business needs by simply “reusing” existing functionalities, allowing enterprises to gain agility in responding to change.