Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) – Working across companies requires flexibility and the capability to deal with large amounts of information. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to constructing software that meets business requirements by using a set of independent services available on a network. Although software is traditionally built from components, SOA services are very loosely coupled and highly interoperable—increasing reusability. SOA platforms like MODUSPHERE's M-Sphere is able to leverage completely different technologies (i.e., Java, Microsoft .NET, legacy C/C++ modules) within and between services.

A given service may have multiple interfaces, supporting totally different kinds of access for different applications. An example is a messaging interface for handling a large volume of information coming in on a queue; another example would be a web services interface to respond instantly to a web user accessing a portal.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) – An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a technology for managing the invocation of services anywhere in the platform both securely and reliably. Services in M-Sphere are accessed via its ESB, allowing flexible configuration and the addition of new services easily—without disrupting any of the other services.

The Enterprise Service Bus of MODUSPHERE's M-Sphere also provides a valuable buffering and queuing capability to enable sudden surges of incoming information and activity to be gracefully handled, making extensive use of advanced queuing. Below is an illustration of a typical ESB architecture.