SOBA Fabric: a framework for Business Services Networks Due to copyright restrictions full text for this article is not available

We introduce SOBA (Service Oriented Business Applications) Fabric, an architectural framework for Business Services Networks (BSN). BSNs extend the enterprise service bus concept beyond the boundaries of a single enterprise, enabling companies to build on each other's applications and create new loosely-coupled, network-centric business models. SOBA Fabric facilitates dynamic integration of people, processes, and information across business and technology boundaries by providing: 1) Dynamic provisioning and service personalization so that subscribers can quickly customize a business process to work with their systems and processes; 2) Industry-specific Service Level Agreements; 3) An industry-specific business services catalog supporting dynamic discovery and composition; 4) Business Process Management tools interface tailored to industry requirements; and 5) Visibility and exception handling across the BSN. Most importantly, SOBA Fabric provides industry-specific semantic "dial tones" that enable applications to plug and play at the business process level, using standardized XML business vocabularies. We describe the SOBA Architecture and present a case study from a successful deployment in the Insurance sector.