Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) allows you to leverage existing assets and manage the diversity and complexity within the Retailer’s organization. Using SOA, Retailers are building complex systems which can handle changes with minimal changes. Supermarket News is reporting on how in Texas, Retailers are using SOA to account for the tax break on school-related purchases which is an annual activity. The use of Services is making life easier by limiting changes. While the adoption of SOA has been slow in retail but over the last two years the speed of adoption has picked up. The Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) is also supporting the SOA adoption by providing SOA Blueprint for Retail which provides step-by-step guide and best practices in attaching SOA.

SOA is an IT framework that a growing number of retailers — 56% of respondents in an ARTS survey — are beginning to explore, and that some regard as a potentially game-changing approach to the retail business.

“There's a higher SOA penetration in retail today than 24 months ago,” said Richard Mader, executive director of ARTS (the Association of Retail Technology Standards), a division of the National Retail Federation, Washington.

The importance of SOA is reflected in the attention it is being given by ARTS, which counts among its members such major food retailers as Kroger, Safeway and Publix. In January, ARTS unveiled an SOA Blueprint for Retail, the result of a project, co-chaired by Dorf, to give ARTS members a free step-by-step guide to adopting SOA, along with vendor-neutral best practices. (The Blueprint is available to non-members for $249.) ARTS has also made available — in some cases just to ARTS members, in other cases to anyone — some downloadable building blocks of SOA technology.