SOA - Service Oriented Architecture

The speed of change at companies has shot up in order, among other things, to meet customers' requirements. It is Wincor Nixdorf's policy to keep up with market changes and take ever shorter process lifecycles into account by setting up a smart company and IT architecture. Orientation to business processes is at the heart of our activities.

A service-oriented architecture allows Wincor Nixdorf to offer its customers a software platform that will provide custom, optimized processes.

Goal:
The goal of SOA is to adapt heterogeneous system landscapes efficiently to changed business processes. This means reengineering the IT systems in order to be able to integrate and continue using existing software on the one hand, and to implement changed business processes and new market requirements easily and quickly in the existing IT landscape on the other hand.

Approach:
Every single business process is split up into small units called services. Then these units are loosely coupled – like in a building block system – so that these services can be combined together flexibly. The individual services are coupled for every business process, or new services are added. When a business procedure changes, it is only necessary to modify the affected service or create a new one and integrate it in the respective business processes.

Benefits:
Companies can keep up with market dynamics without delay by introducing new services. Multiple use of individual services helps to reduce costs noticeably. IT infrastructures are interoperable as they are based on industry standards – another principle of SOA. Shorter response times and greater efficiency can be achieved as a result. In addition, orientation to business processes makes business process outsourcing (BPO) much easier because processes outsourced by customers can be established more efficiently at Wincor Nixdorf.