The Cutit ownership team has nowhere near the resources or in-house expertise to plan a transition toward an SOA-based automation environment. They therefore engage a local consulting firm to take charge of the planning and analysis effort. The goal is to complete this project within a month and then use the resulting reports to decide on a delivery strategy.
The consultants spend the next few weeks invading Cutit's environments to document technology and business requirements. They look at service encapsulation options for legacy systems and service-based middleware platforms as part of a marketplace survey but also perform some analysis around the creation of custom services to replace the outdated automation hub.
As part of the final analysis, a preliminary service-oriented architecture is conceptualized and supplemented with a list of Web service-centric technology components required to establish it. Cutit reviews the reports and takes the consultants' recommendations into consideration. The report emphasizes the pursuit of reuse, but Cutit is more interested in leveraging service-oriented computing to establish unity across its modest enterprise and to achieve a state where solution logic can be more easily extended in response to unpredictable business demands.
Regardless, Cutit decides to proceed to the next step. Before moving ahead and building actual services, they invest in the creation of a service inventory blueprint. Cutit cannot afford to wait more than three weeks before entering the development stage, so this model will need to be high-level and therefore somewhat incomplete.
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