A Successful Implementation of Service Oriented Architecture

Recent research suggests that companies are exploiting the agile and innovative potential of SOA, but are regarding it as a technical issue. In this article we present and discuss a very successful SOA implementation. We conducted an in-depth case study at an international airline company. Analyzing the relationship between service oriented architecture and the development of new business services in the company, we identify three success factors: First, A comprehensive implementation of an enterprise service bus and the encapsulation of components in each level of the architecture. Second, the importance of maintaining a clean ESB architecture. And third, there should be one development team per layer.