Survey of SOA and cloud-based B2B e-commerce and supply chain applications

Abstract

The IT for building a static and centralised infrastructure and applications does not provide companies flexibility to make rapid changes for the needs of evolving business. The changes in a traditional architecture could be complex, inefficient, and costly. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a flexible and standards-based approach to IT architecture that uses a modular approach to delivering IT services. The ability of SOA to integrate with new services quickly and easily has attracted many companies to adopt SOA today. Cloud computing is now persuasive. It has unique capabilities in enabling efficient and cost effective business processes. A company may consider moving their IT architecture to a cloud computing infrastructure. Since SOA and cloud computing share many common characteristics of service orientation for interoperability, this paper discusses the adoption of SOA for the future preparation of the cloud. This paper further illustrates the utility and capabilities of SOA/cloud strategy by discussing its applicability in the domains of e-commerce and inter-enterprise collaboration. Commercially available solutions are surveyed to show the current status and trends in this arena.