BANGALORE, INDIA: It's the most wonderful yet hectic time of the year as consumers vie for mall parking spaces and also spend their precious lunch hours shopping online.  Meanwhile, vendors are busy carefully managing and monitoring inventory and their supplier relationships to ensure their goods are delivered to stores and homes on time.

Of course, an SOA could help these vendors streamline, integrate and manage their various applications for customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM). Ideally, this integration through the SOA would help ensure that customers are satisfied and retailers have a successful holiday season.

For many retailers, however, it’s not an easy task to oversee the manufacturing and timely delivery of goods in a highly competitive, global marketplace – all during a finite period of time.

With this in mind, perhaps we could all learn some important lessons about building a service oriented architecture by taking a closer look at one of the first and most successful SOA projects. This project is representative of a Smart SOA strategy, is based in the North Pole and was initiated by Santa Claus to better manage his workshop.