As retailers seek to be more competitive and agile, they are looking to address issues related to supporting business process automation across departments and applications, increasing operational visibility, connecting applications in a cost-effective manner and making the entire IT framework flexible enough to meet the constant changing business demands.

SOA as defined by the W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group is a distributed systems architecture that is characterized by a logical view of programs and processes, message orientation, description orientation, network orientation, granularity and platform neutrality. This open, Internet-standards based approach to integration enables pervasive application connectivity, and alignment of IT with business and agility. Since business services can be re-used and adapted quickly for change and lower cost of acquisition and management, there is no vendor lock-in.

SkillNet helps retailers to come up with an enterprise SOA strategy and implement such a strategy in a phased manner. We have used SOA to address integration requirements both, within and around the solution areas of eCommerce, POS, Multi-Channel Integration, StoreHub.