Visiphor embraces the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm for many of our software solutions. SOA is an application architecture in which all functions, or services, are defined using a description language and have invokable interfaces that are called to perform business processes. Each interaction is independent of each and every other interaction and the interconnect protocols of the communicating devices (i.e., the infrastructure components that determine the communication system) do not affect the interfaces. In an ideal SOA system the interfaces are platform-independent, so a client from any device using any operating system in any language can use the service.

SOA Characteristics:

• reusability and composition - being able to share services between applications and data interchanges
• permanence - being able to support both current and future technologies and business requirements
• interoperability - so as to share services between different platforms, operating systems and environments
• distributable - offering both remote access and centralized control
• scalable - being able to expand the system while still maintaining good performance characteristics

Web services are a collection of technologies such as SOAP and XML that are used to publish and consume data. SOA is more than a set of technologies and runs independent of specific technologies and platforms. However, solutions that utilize Web services thereby promote the modularity of data and applications, and as such can be considered an integral part of SOA.