Application deployment and SOA

I work in a application delivery and support group and I am very familiar with Network and Operating system setup and support. I understand the tiered architecture approach and the majority of the applications that I support are Client Server based, with my team supporting the middle tier.

Recently while sitting in a long 2 hour meeting, I had a conversation with our Application Architect concerning SOA, and Web 2.0. I was looking for examples of Web 2.0 and SOA in our infrastructure and at first he was somewhat reluctant to talk about SOA but I pressed him further and we agreed to meet after the meeting to discuss.

Once we met, I told him about my blog and I explained that I was interested in better understanding real word examples of SOA as opposed to digging into any possible new application strategies introduced by our recent merger. He understood and told me that there were more components in a SOA topology than just Web 2.0 and SOA.

We spoke about how older applications had been designed and written to complete 10 to 15 different but similar tasks. In a SOA topology, each one of the 10 to 15 different tasks are broken down into an individual task and delivered as flexible services. He stepped thru the following Application Model within a SOA topology:

Users -> Portal -> BPM -> SOA -> EIM

In the next couple of weeks, I am going to attempt to dive into this model and share my recent understanding of an SOA topology, and try and give real examples of each component.