The objectives of an architecture are often called, “non-functional requirements” or “ilities”. Over the last decade, our architectures have focused on the following ilities:

• Responsiveness – The software’s ability to quickly respond to a users request (e.g. edge caching)
• Scalability – Ability to reasonably grow the capacity of the computing resource (e.g. load balancing)
• Reliability – Insured uptime (e.g. clustering)
• Deploy-ability – Ability to easily (cost effective) deploy and re-deploy an application (e.g. HTML)

The SOE embraces the ilities of the last architecture and adds additional requirements:

• Integrate-ability – The ability to easily integrate systems
• Agility – The ability to quickly change system functionality
• Functional Incrementalism – The ability to add functions in increments (predictability)
• Reusability – The ability to create reusable entities
• Commerce Ready – The contents of the architecture facilitate B2B commerce