EAI & SOA Development & Maintenance: Centralized or Distributed

Centralized Development & Maintenance

1. Knowledge is at one place, difficult to assemble but once accumulated easy to manage
2. EAI and SOA workforce needs exposure to respective systems under lens and specialized knowledge about EAI &/or SOA. In case of centralized development effort manpower can be channelized in effective way and team members develop cross application skills.
3. Better architectural control
4. Better design time security due to centralized policy enforcement.
5. It need more coordination on part of EAI/SOA team but reusability of services will offset that.


Distributed Development & Maintenance

1. Knowledge is distributed across islands of applications, so difficult to manage
2. Cross application skills are not developed but application specific specialists get developed with little exposure to EAI or/& SOA.
3. EAI Workforce may not be utilized if EAI/SOA work is not in sufficient quantity.
4. In distributed development environment, EAI/SOA may loose focus and deviate from Enterprise architecture which may:
a. Jeopardize BPM initiative at later stage;
b. Duplication of services/functionality
5. Increased cost of maintaining and establishing development environment
6. Governance issues may crop up, like ownership of services
7. Difficult to enforce security policies