Before the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in the early 2000s, enterprise businesses developed numerous in-house applications for related business processes. These business applications often contained duplicate functionalities, leading to the same parts of code existing in several internal programs. This created an inefficient, complex, and difficult way to maintain infrastructure.

The idea of SOA was to develop small discreet units of software for a specific functionality that can be reused in different applications. While SOA provides benefits such as easy maintenance, scalability, and efficiency in business processes, it also leads to high costs and bandwidth and computation overload. This has led many enterprises to stay away from implementing SOA for their business processes.

The authors consider SOA integration in business more of an evolutionary process than a revolutionary one. In this research thesis, the authors carry out a literature survey of the advantages, disadvantages, and challenges of adopting SOA in organizations. They conduct a questionnaire-based survey of experts in the field, analyze the data collected, and propose a framework for SOA adoption based on this study. The significant factors of SOA adoption considered are cost, complexity, culture and communication, security, strategy, governance, business and alignment, and return on investment.

This thesis/book presents an industry expert’s perspective on SOA adoption. The literature survey includes many papers; however, it is not a deep dive into the work carried out in the stated research. Certain information is repeated in every chapter, which may cause readers to lose interest. This work can be useful for industry personnel planning to adopt SOA. The proposed SOA adoption framework gives readers an idea of the SOA adoption aspects to consider during the process.