Accenture Architectures and Tools for Service-Oriented Architecture

For businesses and government agencies around the world, service-oriented architecture (SOA) increasingly lies at the core of efforts to transform business processes and their enabling IT operations to achieve high performance.

Accenture leverages its experience in business transformation and technology to deliver a series of technical architectures, frameworks, solutions, tools and methods designed to help clients on their journey toward SOA. These have all been specifically developed to answer the critical questions that clients are asking about SOA. In turn, they are grouped together to form major offerings that give clients solutions to broader issues.

In particular, Accenture has developed three frontline tools to help businesses and governments make a good start on their journeys toward high performance:

• Accenture SOA Assessment model.
  
  
• Accenture SOA Reference Architecture.
  
  
• Accenture SOA Diagnostic.

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Find out how Accenture's individual architectures, frameworks, solutions and tools for SOA can be grouped to help organizations move comprehensively forward on their journeys to high performance.

Related Research and Insights
New Accenture research shows that high performers are twice as likely to take advantage of SOA—in part driven by the fact that SOA enables many of the functions that underpin high performance.

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Accenture uses a set of proven, structured application frameworks and reusable components that span a range of needs.

As they contemplate the journey toward service-oriented architecture, organizations have a range of concerns. These range from how to evaluate the current status quo and the potential impact of SOA, to how to prioritize and design an SOA implementation that minimizes negative effects on the business, to how to architect the business processes in order to take full advantage of SOA's potential to streamline and industrialize the way the organization works.

Accenture's solutions have been created in response to these concerns. They form part of the Accenture Delivery Architecture, which provides a robust platform for Net-centric solutions, overcoming the limitations imposed by diverse platform standards, vendor offerings and client expectations. They address the complete SOA lifecycle.

These solutions also leverage Accenture's Innovation, Global Delivery and Excellence centers to deliver SOA implementations that meet client business goals at the right price.

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Accenture's focused integration architectures and tools leverage its long experience in using technology to optimize business processes, meeting the main concerns that trouble clients within the consistent framework of the Accenture Delivery Architecture.

Solutions and tools include:

• Accenture SOA Assessment Model: Provides customized, practical analysis to support an organization's SOA planning and to help it move more rapidly toward implementation.
  
  
• Accenture SOA Diagnostic: Helps customer's assess their readiness for SOA.
  
  
• Accenture SOA Strategy Road Map: Helps customers prioritize actions for reaching SOA that suits your organizations business goals and starting point.
  
  
• Accenture Business Process Repository: Allows Accenture to leverage its decades of experience by providing access to a repository of thousands of tried-and-tested business processes.
  
  
• Accenture SOA Reference Architecture: Brings together Accenture's best processes from service-oriented architecture engagements worldwide. It includes three parts, which together deliver comprehensive value by helping organizations overcome the most challenging obstacles in xervice-oriented zrchitecture development and deployment.
  
  
• Accenture Services Analysis Tool: Allows companies to understand existing services and how they are delivered to leverage existing applications effectively for SOA.
  
  
• Accenture SOA Job Aid for Accenture Delivery Methods
  A component of Accenture Delivery Methods that provides the framework to guide global multidisciplinary teams on how best to achieve the client's business goals. It helps them to develop methods to streamline tasks, processes and deliverables on an SOA implementation. It also assists in developing a services layer with the correct mix of process-based and technology-based approaches.
  
  
• Accenture Enterprise Architecture SOA Solution: Service-oriented architecture (SOA)represents an opportunity for companies to transform the way they do business by aligning IT and business processes better. However, to realize its potential, SOA must be approached from the point of the view of the entire enterprise architecture. The Accenture Enterprise Architecture SOA Solution helps clients implement SOA successfully as part of a strategy to achieve high performance.
  
  
• Using SOA to Achieve Enterprise Integration: Service-oriented architecture promises to make it easier for businesses to integrate systems—and more importantly the processes they enable. Accenture believes that the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) holds one of the keys to enabling integration to create the high-performance business of the future.

Architectures include:

• ACA.NET: Accenture's largest affiliate company, Avanade, built the Avanade Connected Architecture for .NET (ACA.NET) to support development on the Microsoft.NET platform. ACA.NET allows developers to create efficient and reusable Web services software.
  
  
• General and Reusable Netcentric Delivery Solution (GRNDS): This pre-built and pre-tested J2EE architecture is based on open technology. GRNDS provides the architectural structure to address current immature Web services standards such as security and transaction management. It also provides a way to introduce standards-based components as the specifications mature. GRNDS can speed development time by up to 500 working days and can reduce development costs for architectural framework by as much as 50 percent.