Speaker

Rationalize application portfolio, use SOA or not?

Many organizations have large application portfolios. Application portfolios usually contain a significant amount of duplicate or outdated functionality and data. This usually is the result of mergers and acquisitions or may have been caused by the introduction of large integrated applications such as ERP or CRM. The consequences are high operational cost, complex integration and difficulties in integrating new functionality into the application landscape.

SOA (Sevice Oriented Architecture) is presented as a possible scenario to simplify the application portfolio and to get rid of duplicate functionality. The suggested approach is to first wrap functionality and then removing it without disrupting business or IT continuity. An alternative is to first drastically reduce the number of applications and subsequently introduce SOA. This presentation reviews the pro's and con's of these two alternatives using the TOGAF ADM. Both business perspective and IT perspective will be addressed.

return to program