"I want to provide a roadmap on how to get to SOA," said Guy Hoffman in his presentation at the SOA Web Services Edge Conference and Expo at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on June 5. "If you're going to build a SOA, we have to understand how we do (things) today."

Defining a SOA simply as "a discreet set of services that is reusable across an organization," Hoffman said developers must Harvest, Promote, and Deprecate to be effective with SOA. "Your existing legacy applications currently exist in thousands of discreet services," he said. "How do you find the underlying logic and map your services to it?"

The first phase is to harvest, that is, "understand and locate your existing logic." The second is to "promote service candidates into a repository," followed by deprecating all the redundant instances of that logic.

Within this context, Hoffman outlined a Five-Step Program to getting started with SOAs.

1. Identify the key business services you want to start with
2. Locate the instances of the logic currently in place to execute these services
3. Understand how all of the existing logic works
4. Create the logic to execute the service
5. Deprecate all prior instances of the logic and replace with the new service

"But getting there is not enough," he pointed out. "You can use the service orientation to minimize risk, accelerate cycle time, and reduce costs. But you must monitor the situation afterwards, to find "all the places that code may touch the new logic in the SOA." The bottom line, he said, is "your existing legacy apps are a gold mine, and there are plenty of solutions out there once you get there."

Hoffman's presentation was streamed live to a worldwide audience via SYS-CON.TV.  The event is colocated with the Enterprise Open Source Conference and Exhibition and the Real-World Ajax Seminar, and is being held June 5-6.