IT should not be all about technology. We’ve been striving always to put business needs and policy. That said we end up with a lot of specialized applications through different units in our institution. There’s a growing challenge to support in-house applications.

Problems like managing data synchronization and application integration are some of the common things faced by IT support unit. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is a standards-based approach is a thing which we eye to facilitate specialized applications working together.

We’ve got a diverse set of database like Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, and Postgre which is having front end applications like Oracle Forms and Reports, PL/SQL web applications, PHP web applications, and others. Our IT Unit is thinking of complete process-level integration solution with minimal effort, but we’re on a wall on how to implement this SOA.

Cost on license fees and proprietary software is a major hurdle. Any open source solution would be worth looking into. The ultimate goal is to improve reusability of software assets. Another would be to provide better business and IT integration. All of these will increase response to business changes and demands in the marketplace.

Open source SOA would be a solution for budget tight organizations that like to integrate applications and business processes. I am still looking on learning open source SOA and how to implement it in our institute.