The Concise Introduction to Modern SOA: High-Value Approaches, Innovative Technologies, Proven Use Cases After a decade of innovation in technology and practice, SOA is now a mainstream computing discipline, capable of transforming IT enterprises and optimizing business automation. In Next Generation SOA, top-selling SOA author Thomas Erl and a team of experts present a plain-English tour of SOA, service-orientation, and the key service technologies being used to build sophisticated contemporary service-oriented solutions. The starting point for today's IT professionals, this concise guide distills the increasingly growing and diverse field of service-oriented architecture and the real-world practice of building powerful service-driven systems. Accessible and jargon-free, this book intentionally avoids technical details to provide easy-to-understand, introductory coverage of the following topics: Services, service-orientation, and service-oriented computing: what they are and how they have evolved How SOA and service-orientation change businesses and transform IT culture, priorities, and technology decisions How services are defined and composed to solve a wide spectrum of business problems Deep implications of the service-orientation paradigm--illuminated through an annotation of the classic SOA Manifesto Traditional and contemporary service technologies and architectures How clouds and virtualization support the scalability and reliability of services-based solutions SOA-based industry models, from enterprise service to global trader A detailed case study: how real enterprises bring together contemporary SOA practices, models, and technologies Next Generation SOA will be indispensable to wide audiences of business decision makers and technologists--including architects, developers, managers, executives, strategists, consultants, and researchers.