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To fully leverage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), companies must go further than setting up an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This article describes the 3 main challenges lying behind SOA implementation : Governance, Service Lifecycle Management, & Profiling.

Organization’s technology heterogeneity and thus operational complexity drastically increased over the past decade. Moreover, ever increasing interdependencies is more & more challenging to manage. Service Oriented architecture (SOA) has long been an approach to tackle this complexity by:

• Driving the maintenance costs down
• Increasing the agility of the company’s IT
• Easing integration of third party tools and solutions

To materialize those benefits and fully leverage SOA, companies must go further than setting up an ESB. Indeed, beside the availability of an ESB implementation, the challenge of SOA lies in three main aspects: Governance, Service Lifecycle Management and Profiling. Each of these lever must impact organizations at three different levels:

1. By formalizing rules and gathering actionable meta- data, Governance allows you to master your IT’s complexity.
2. By focusing on their added value, Service Lifecycle Management guarantees the reusability of your services.
3. By monitoring and analysing the behaviour of users and services on the bus, the Profiling allows you to act on facts rather than on feelings.

As a conclusion, tackling those three aspects will allow you to go beyond the simple implementation of an ESB and grasp the full benefits that SOA can offer.