What is Consumer SOA? "COSA"

So what is Consumer Oriented Service Architecture (COSA)?

SOA is a well known and established technology area with innovation driven by technology vendors like BEA/Oracle and SoftwareAG for leveraging/wrapping legacy applications and rapidly integrating technology across platforms, partners, and customers but COSA is a new concept.

The term itself was coined by Oracle Product Manager Vikas Jain in his blog
http://ws-security.blogspot.com/2009/10/consumer-oriented-service-architecture.html
But the idea is well established and was driven by those delivering services not by technology vendors.

As Vikas points out "While SOA concentrated on how to make the service architecture better, it left out on the consumer focus. The consumer focus becomes especially important when services are exposed to partners."

Vikas goes on to define the key challenges and requirements for a COSA solution such as Consumer Identification, Throttling so that the right customers get the right SLA, Contracts & Policies, Reporting, and Provisioning.

Today media vendors and social media vendors are leading the charge and paving the road with innovative technology vendors like Vordel, Sonoa Systems, Layer7, and Intel.

MTV Networks is a great example with their work with Sonoa Systems:
http://www.sonoasystems.com/about-us/news-and-events/mtv-networks-selects-sonoa-for-api-infrastrcture-feed-management

It is also demonstrated by the participation of Steve Riley, Evangelist and Strategy for Amazon at the Vordel User Conference.
http://www.vordel.com/news/press/16_09_09.html


Intel is targeting Oracle Fusion customers with http://www.intelforfusion.com/

Layer7 is also making waves with their announcement around integrating Oracle Service Bus with their hardware XML Gateway. http://www.layer7tech.com/main/products/osba.html