Ecosystem Oriented Architecture (EOA)

SOA has been designed and envisioned for being applied inside an Enterprise as a means to bridge systems and to create a governance layer on top of existing platforms as either legacy or assets. Inside Enterprises there is administration ability of the SOA infrastructure, ability to handle the network and having control over IT resources and IP: everything is reasonably under control.

Between enterprise, in a B2B environment that implements a value chain, SOA still scale up even if with some differences related to a more extend functional model and some negotiation ability.

In a Digital Ecosystems (DES) however, this is not true any more – IPs may change, protocols are subject to be replaced without notice, UDDI needs to be shared among parties, UDDI becomes vital for indexing and discovering services, functional models need to change at a pace which is faster than any ability to maintains coherence and harmonization via a managed coordination process. DES need to support very loosely coupled communities which brings news challenges in SOA architecture, and dealing with this reality requires re-thinking the founding principles and technology of SOA.
EAO is the name for this novel approach to DES architectures. It is a conceptual framework, it represents a collection of best practices principles and patterns related to Ecosystem-aware decentralized computing and architectures.