The Challenges
Enterprises face significant challenges today to meet rapidly growing customer expectations for online experiences. The online applications must be continually differentiated from competitors; which requires a highly flexible and responsive technical framework. This pain is most acute in applications that are constantly compared by customers and employees against rapidly evolving competitive alternatives. Failure to keep pace with these competitors is leading to a loss of customer revenue and to employee attraction and retention issues in the war for talent. Enterprises are seeking a better way to deliver and continually enhance differentiated applications that are built for change.

The Existing Options
There are three traditional approaches to deliver applications: build (custom code), buy (software packages), or rent (Application Service Provider [ASP] or Software as a Service [SaaS]). All three options force a trade-off between differentiation and total cost of ownership and none deliver on the key requirement of business agility.

A New Option
A new approach has emerged to address this need. It leverages the ultimate promise of a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) referred to variously as “assemble”, “composite apps”, “mash-ups”, or “loosely-coupled,” to deliver differentiated applications that are built for change and because of this they are much more cost-effective over time.

The challenge has been that SOA in practice has meant either a conceptual architecture or a specific web service – and rarely anything in between. There have been few organizations capable of assembling complete solutions and proving the approach superior to traditional options. Optaros has spent the last three years delivering Assemblies for over 70 companies. We have learned that the keys to making Assembly work in practice. See Assemble Keys <