Mapping Legacy Services to SOA

The embracement of service oriented architecture (SOA) has the potential to by orders of magnitude reduce the cost of ownership while more effectively making services readily available to whom ever and when ever needed. Much needed functionality may need to be developed, but much is either in legacy systems or in some capability pipeline. WeatherEye applies a set of procedures and organizational construct to identify existing capability, capability in the pipeline and futures to more quickly capitalize on SOA.

Legacy systems contain many functions when as a whole create the application. These functions also have value as standalone services. The ideal situation is to make these functional services available without impacting the legacy system. This can be accomplished by a service

interface to the application or extract the functionality and create a service wrapper. In both cases the goal is achieved through the maximum use of proven components and code.

How do WeatherEye's customer's achieve their SOA goals? First by beginning to catalog functions in legacy systems and map this functions to required SOA capability. The second stage is to define a process and technolgies to interface to SOA either directly or through a wrapper. Finally, identify new service requirements that need to be developed or acquired from a third party. Bundled, these services offer a range of capabilities that blend proven, customer specific components with new or technologically superior components. All being delivered in a continuous improvement fashion.