SOA

SOA the Microsoft way

One of the key benefits of SOA is a "Stronger connections with customers and suppliers". I imagine a company such as GE that sells such a wide range of products and has many different divisions and departments. If GE were to collect customer data such as purchasing habits and demographics they would easily be able to data mine for opportunities to sell different products to existing customers. Having a service that pulls customer demographic information and purchasing habits would be of great use to a very large company. The marketers for each product line would be able to work quickly with their IT people to get the data they need without having to pay for the entire searching feature every time.

For example, say that the microwave oven marketers were looking for new people to sell microwaves to. They could do some data mining and find out which demographic of people who buy other GE products also buy microwaves. But using an already written service the microwave oven marketers would not incur a huge cost to set up a very customized data mining operation. Once they had the right demographic it would be easy to use the service to get the personal information and send advertisements and promotions to the right people.