Looking at the Oracle 5-Level SOA Model

In addition to looking at vendor-neutral SOA Logical Frameworks and models, I would like to also look at what leading vendors are proposing in terms of SOA Framewors.

Oracle helps to define the technical and organizational characteristics of businesses with SOA implementation at several discrete levels of maturity.

They define a SOA maturity model that helps to address common questions and provides guidance in planning and execution.

The 5-level SOA Maturity Model that gives decision makers a frame of reference to evaluate the SOA maturity level of their organizations.

This Model gives decision makers a framework they can use to evaluate the current state of SOA capabilities across their architecture, tools, technologies, development processes, information management, governance, people and processes, and internal organization structure.

Level One: Opportunistic Initial exploration stage of SOA - Most organizations are currently at the first level of adoption. Here, businesses identify simple projects that can be completed quickly, often in the form of a prototype and usually building a service on top of an existing application and exposing it to a user through a Web portal or a Web Service in an App Server environment. The focus is to show quick value and demonstrate ROI to business end-users and management


Level Two: Tactical A big leap from Level 1. Organizations begin to use the ESB . They begin to orchestrate web services with BPEL. users commonly interact with composite applications assembled from individual services. Service reuse benefits begin to be be felt. Use of Web services security and management solutions to enforce different security policies begin to become a priority. User and identity management infrastructures begin to become more sophisticated.

Level Three: Strategic In this stage the focus shifts from technological change to organizational changes. The SOA infrastructure is in place and well understood. Level three is about putting in place the strategic business changes to effectively use SOA and Business Process Management . Automation of manual business processes is a key focus. At this stage, an organization's business users regularly uses BPEL to freely define, automate and change underlying processes according to business needs instead of being constrained to existing software solutions. SOA is now ingraned in the development strategy and all new projects must factor this in .

Level Four: Enterprise Wide AdoptionIn this fourth stage of the SOA maturity businesses have pervasive measurement and improvement mechanisms built into their SOA applications that track key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level agreements (SLAs) in real-time. This information allows the business to more efficiently and effectively manage its operations and to optimize business processes in response to real-time and historical data. Event-Driven technology and infrastructure starts being used extensively in order to build sense and respond applications.


Level Five: Industrialized SOA The "Nirvana" scenario - Organizaiton is in a continuous, real-time feedback that automatically adjusts business processes and systems to changing conditions. Complete automation of the system with the business users managing the entire process from a "Dashboard"

An Evaluation of SOA Frameworks

This Blog aims to keep readers updated with my work on evaluating SOA Frameworks.

My goal is to explore existing and emerging SOA Frameworks to understand their relative strengths and how they can help in expediting successful SOA implementations.