Software Engineering Institute

This article addresses the problem of the migration of legacy components to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments. It focuses on the development of a realistic strategy for performing such a migration, taking into account the business needs of the organization and the technical content of the organization’s existing systems portfolio. It highlights the challenges of building an SOA-based system and presents development issues from three perspectives: the application developer, the infrastructure developer, and the service provider. Because there is a current trend of organizations that are leveraging the value of their legacy systems by exposing all or parts of it as services within an SOA environment, the concerns and needs of the service provider are presented in greater detail. SMART, a method for making decisions on the migration of legacy assets as services within SOA environments is presented.