The Concise Introduction to Modern SOA: High-Value Approaches, Innovative Technologies, Proven Use Cases

After a decade of innovation in technology and practice, SOA is now a mainstream computing discipline, capable of transforming IT enterprises and optimizing business automation. In Next Generation SOA, top-selling SOA author Thomas Erl and a team of experts present a plain-English tour of SOA, service-orientation, and the key service technologies being used to build sophisticated contemporary service-oriented solutions.

The starting point for today's IT professionals, this concise guide distills the increasingly growing and diverse field of service-oriented architecture and the real-world practice of building powerful service-driven systems. Accessible and jargon-free, this book intentionally avoids technical details to provide easy-to-understand, introductory coverage of the following topics:

• Services, service-orientation, and service-oriented computing: what they are and how they have evolved
• How SOA and service-orientation change businesses and transform IT culture, priorities, and technology decisions
• How services are defined and composed to solve a wide spectrum of business problems
• Deep implications of the service-orientation paradigm--illuminated through an annotation of the classic SOA Manifesto
• Traditional and contemporary service technologies and architectures
• How clouds and virtualization support the scalability and reliability of services-based solutions
• SOA-based industry models, from enterprise service to global trader
• A detailed case study: how real enterprises bring together contemporary SOA practices, models, and technologies

Next Generation SOA will be indispensable to wide audiences of business decision makers and technologists--including architects, developers, managers, executives, strategists, consultants, and researchers.

Thomas Erl is a top-selling IT author, founder of Arcitura Education, and series editor of the Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl. With more than 175,000 copies in print worldwide, his books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major IT organizations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Accenture, IEEE, HL7, MITRE, SAP, CISCO, HP, and many others. As CEO of Arcitura Education Inc., Thomas has led the development of curricula for the internationally recognized Big Data Science Certified Professional (BDSCP), Cloud Certified Professional (CCP) and SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) accreditation programs, which have established a series of formal, vendor-neutral industry certifications obtained by thousands of IT professionals around the world. Thomas has toured more than 20 countries as a speaker and instructor. More than 100 articles and interviews by Thomas have been published in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and CIO Magazine.

Clive Gee has over 30 years' experience in the IT industry and has worked for IBM in both the UK and the United States, spending the majority of his career as a solution architect dedicated to the early customer implementations of emerging technologies such as object-orientation, mobile computing, and SOA. Clive has taken on the role of consulting architect on many customer engagements in the aerospace, manufacturing, and public sectors, as well as projects in the retail, transportation, telecommunications, insurance, and financial industries. He has a strong business focus and a track record of developing innovative and yet practical solutions to fulfill real business needs.

Over the last few years, Clive has turned his attention to SOA governance, a field in which he is considered to be a leading worldwide practitioner. He has led efforts with several major organizations in the United States, Japan, and Australia that were successful at establishing SOA Centers of Excellence and implementing effective governance in areas of service-orientation.

Clive is currently residing in Scotland's Northern Isles as a semi-retiree who still agrees to take part in the occasional project. He is a co-author of the book titled SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business Agility (IBM Press 2008), as well as another book from the Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl titled SOA Governance: Governing Shared Services On-Premise and in the Cloud.

An expert in middleware, Jurgen Kress currently works at Oracle EMEA Alliances and Channels and is responsible for Oracle's EMEA fusion middleware partner business. He is the founder of the Oracle SOA & BPM, WebLogic Partner Communities, and the global Oracle Partner Advisory Councils. The Fusion Middleware Partner Community is home to over 5,000 members internationally as Oracle's most active and successful community, which Jurgen manages with monthly newsletters, Webcasts, and conferences. He also hosts the annual Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forums and Fusion Middleware Summer Camps, where more than 200 partners receive product updates, roadmap insights, and hands-on training supplemented by a variety of Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, discussion forums, online communities, blogs, and wikis. Jurgen is also a member of the steering board of the International SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium, and is a frequent speaker at conferences that include the SOA & BPM Integration Days, JAX, UKOUG, OUGN, and OOP.

Berthold Maier enjoys working for a wide portfolio of clients as a chief architect and enterprise architect, and possesses over 18 years of experience as a developer, coach, and architect in the building of complex mission-critical applications and in integration scenarios. Throughout his 11-year career at Oracle, Berthold has been given leading positions within the consulting division that notably included chief architect, a management position in which he assumed responsibility for reference architectures involving SOA and enterprise integration. Berthold is also the originator and architect of several frameworks around EAM and SOA, and is well-known as a conference speaker, book author, and magazine writer.

Hajo Normann works for Accenture in the role of SOA & BPM Community of Practice lead in ASG and is responsible for the architecture and solution design of SOA/BPM projects, primarily acting as the interface between business and IT. He enjoys tackling organizational and technical challenges and motivating solutions in customer workshops, conferences, and publications. Together with Torsten Winterberg, Hajo leads the DOAG SIG Middleware and is an Oracle ACE director and active member of a global network within Accenture who is in regular contact with SOA/BPM architects from around the world.

Pethuru Raj possesses over 12 years of professional experience in the IT industry. In his academic career, he was granted international fellowships, JSPS and JST, to work as a postdoctoral researcher at two leading Japanese universities for three years. After earning a UGC-sponsored PhD degree from Anna University in Chennai, India, Pethuru obtained a CSIR fellowship to work as a research associate in the department of Computer Science and Automation at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Pethuru has worked as an application architect for eight years and a product architect for four years, leveraging the opportunities that came his way to become specialized in the business domains of telecommunications, retail, government, energy, and healthcare.

Prior to his career at Wipro Consulting, Pethuru spent one year as the enterprise architect at Sify Software Ltd. and over a year and a half as a lead architect in Bosch's corporat…