This section of the tour describes the business need for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus.
Many businesses have heterogeneous information technology (IT) environments, made up of many different applications, on different hardware, operating systems and written in different programming languages.
Without the right middleware infrastructure, integrating them can be complex and difficult to maintain.
In response to the increasing pace of business change, it may be necessary to modify existing applications again and again to integrate with new applications or react to new business conditions.
It often requires skills and knowledge of legacy applications and their implementation in an ever more complex architecture.
This is expensive and time-consuming, driving down the productivity of scarce IT personnel and increasing the time to value of IT investment.