How do you balance the need to achieve an early success with SOA against the requirement for an architecture that will deliver long term success? You don't want to get bogged down in architectural committees for three years, but you don't want to make short term decisions that will be roadblocks to long term success.

If your first project is to deploy a small number of reusable services in a matter of months but you know that four years from now you might have hundreds of services, an enterprise SOA infrastructure and specialized governance technology you have a dilemma. How do you move forward

Introduction

Application integration at its simplest is often just one application sending a message to another to notify it of some change. Perhaps when a patient arrives at a hospital, the registration system will send a message to clinical systems so they have all demographic data ready to use. Of perhaps it is just a nightly file transfer from the sales system to the accounting system.

But modern application integration platforms or suites can do a lot more than this to help applications work together and add real value to the enterprise.

Lots of terms have come into use over the years to des