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SOA Applications - Making Use of Your SOA Investment

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been the talk of IT for the last decade. Based on the promise of efficiency, independent software vendors and enterprise IT organizations have been diligently exposing APIs via web services and re-architecting applications to support services orientation.

Unfortunately, the promise of SOA remains largely unfulfilled. A recent report by Nucleus Research indicates, "only a minority of companies are getting a return on investment in SOA." The same report highlights the root of the problem: "While SOA drives developer productivity, SOA often ends with the project—limiting the ability for broad SOA to deliver ROI."

Current Situation	The Opportunity
SOA helps a limited set of developers become marginally more productive.	Using services, applications are rapidly assembled from existing building blocks.
Many available enterprise services remain unused.	Application assembly can be done those closest to the business need—without requiring programming skills.
Working with services requires highly-skilled developers.	Different systems, whether behind the firewall or internet-based services, are easily connected.

SOA, Web Services and Business Mashups

Serena Business Mashups are the killer application for SOA and Web services. Instead of relying on highly-skilled developers for all SOA work, non-programmers can visually assemble process-based, composite applications, called Mashups, using a simple, drag-and-drop user interface.

By enabling more people to assemble applications, IT organizations can focus on core competencies, while enabling those closest to the business needs to rapidly create innovative applications based on sanctioned building blocks.

Using Serena Business Mashups you can:

• Build applications that automate common business activities—including activities that span different groups (such as HR and finance) or applications (such as Salesforce.com and SAP).
• Allow widespread innovation while maintaining IT security, audit and uptime requirements.
• Address the ever-growing backlog of application requests by enabling non-programmers to assemble applications from existing building blocks.