With so much emphasis on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) these days, there is a heightened focus on its deployment, success and demonstrable ROI. In fact, Gartner states that the worldwide market opportunity for SOA, including software and services, will continue to grow through 2008 when it is expected to reach USD 143B. Further, Aberdeen recently underscored the growing value of SOA with its findings that companies can save up to USD 53 billion in IT spending over the next five years by implementing a SOA.
According to Martin Chee, Country Manager for the IBM Singapore Software Group, SOA is more than a collection of Web Services. Its success requires governance to establish the ground rules and ensure that the hard work associated with modeling, assembling, deploying and monitoring your SOA is not all for naught. Without modeling your business and fully understanding the SOA that you wish to deploy, you may risk limiting the effectiveness and full potential that can be derived from an SOA.
SOA Helps to Realise Greater Rewards from Your IT Investment
Creating a repository of Web Services will always be a critical and inherent part of your SOA. Further proving this is the proliferation of industry-specific Web Services that are being made publicly available in an effort to streamline SOA development efforts and share best practices.
The point here is not to diminish the value of reuse throughout your organisation. Rather, it’s to inspire you to extend your architecture to include the latest industry standards when creating services.
This becomes especially important in light of the fact that SOA developers and architects today are challenged by the need to:
- Unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform
- More easily create new and transform existing IT assets into reusable services
- Simplify how business services are created
- Access data regardless of its location or format
- Allow customers to build standards based services and components regardless of the language choices
Asia Suffers from Lack of Awareness of SOA
Springboard Research has released results from its research focused on SOA in Asia. A key finding from the research is that within the Asian region, there is an overall lack of awareness of SOA, which is the key factor holding back wider adoption.
Springboard surveyed 2,615 CIOs and IT Decision Makers in Australia, China, India, and Singapore and found that only 21% were aware of the concept of SOA. From the survey results, IBM had a massive lead over other IT vendors with 50% of organizations planning to implement SOA saying that IBM was the best suited to help them migrate to a service oriented architecture.
“While many major IT Vendors are banking on SOA as part of their growth strategy, it is clear that more needs to be done in educating the market on SOA and the benefits that it can provide” said Dane Anderson, Vice President of Research at Springboard Research. “While there has been considerable hype about SOA in the market, adequate awareness is not filtering down to the enterprise level, which will be an adoption roadblock unless more education and market awareness takes place.”
Springboard found that of organisations that have deployed SOA, the majority (54%) were using it to achieve application integration. The second highest category at 27% was utilizing SOA to deliver Web Services and Web Applications, followed by organizations using SOA to achieve data integration across the enterprise (9%) and making services shareable across the enterprise (9%).
The survey also provided details regarding the factors prohibiting organizations from deploying SOA. The most common factor cited by organizations was that they were not sure of the benefits SOA would deliver (28% of organizations). Following this, several factors arose including other priorities (25%), legacy applications (15%), organizational issues (13%), and funding limitations (9%).
SOA should, however, remain at the top of the executive and IT agenda based on their ability to more closely align technology with the needs of the business. Quickly dismantling the high statistics associated with IT project failures, SOAs have shown demonstrable Return on Investment (ROI). So much so that the proven successes of SOAs have enabled this segment to swell to represent a worldwide market opportunity of USD 60.3 billion. This growth is up by 75 percent compared to 2005 when the market was estimated at USD 34.6 billion. Moreover, the SOA market is expected to skyrocket with an anticipated 54 percent continued growth through 2008 to reach USD 143 billion (Gartner report).
Furthering the growth of the SOA market is the strategy’s ability to pay for itself quickly. In fact, the number of opportunities for quick return on investment (RoI) can be surprising. For example, many organizations are unaware of the number of duplicate processes that occur in separate departments and applications—and how much these duplicate processes are costing them. When you examine the costs and lost revenue attributable to redundant function and duplicated effort, you begin to see the value of centralized services over having to manage multiple competing and overlapping functions.
Still, there are some watchers out there asking, “how can SOA succeed where previous approaches have failed?” and “how do I avoid becoming a statistic?”
Achieving a Successful SOA Strategy: Martin Chee
Simply stated, a successful SOA strategy can be achieved because the standards, best practices, and governance models have finally matured to the point where reuse can actually work. After all, SOA is, by definition, architecture as well as an approach to IT that can help solve immediate business challenges. While each company has different business needs and each industry faces its own set of challenges, there are common issues that can lead to the failure of an SOA. The ten most prevalent are:
Lack of executive sponsorship
Before presenting how you will ensure your company’s SOA success, be prepared to demonstrate successes and failures of other companies on their path to SOA and articulate how you will emulate proven practices and avoid pitfalls.
Align the troops
Converse to overcoming the obstacle of executive support for your SOA is the challenge of aligning your organization to work and think in new ways. To do this, identify and recruit critical champions for each part of the business who will support and even evangelize the SOA efforts.
Consolidate views
Eliminate the multiple views of information that are currently floating across your organization, so you are only looking at a singular, comprehensive, and consistent view of the business.
Reuse equals re-useful
Identify and maintain a repository of your current web services to avoid duplication of efforts. You may be surprised how much work different pockets of your organisation have already done.
Integrate the silos
While in theory many of today’s IT organizations are seeking to integrate and avoid redundancies while maximizing their current IT investments, the reality is that extraordinary efforts are being spent on trying to maintain different IT systems that co-exist, but are not integrated. The ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ approach to SOA does not work.
Seeing the forest through the trees
Remember that an SOA is an architecture, not a combination of clumsily bundled together point products that need to be force fit. A true SOA is created with an open standards based approach through four strategic stages: model, assemble, deploy and manage.
Hop on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
An ESB provides the much needed connectivity.
Step-by-step
When the thought of rolling an enterprise-wide SOA becomes overwhelming, remember the best approach is to continually test and modify while rolling it out, first departmentally and then slowly throughout the organization to identify issues while adding to your arsenal of best practices along the way.
Avoid the carpe diem approach
Remember that you are not building your SOA just for today or this year. This is an organization-wide approach to aligning IT with the needs of the business and must accommodate today’s needs as well as those of the future. For example, be sure to include support for mobile and wireless devices as well as ensuring you have enough flexibility to support the next big thing.
Prevent the accidental SOA
Many organizations may discover that they have a healthy repository of Web Services that will comprise the majority of their SOA. That said, don’t believe that the SOA starts and ends with a collection of Web Services. Remember that an SOA must go beyond Web Services to support all your business processes. It must also provide a flexible, extensible and composable approach to reusing and extending existing applications and services as well as constructing new ones.
For every SOA success story, there lays an abandoned SOA project stuck in one of the various stages of deployment. Still, SOAs remain at the top of the executive and IT agenda based on their ability to closely align technology with the needs of the business.
Conclusion
SOA is an approach to IT that can help solve immediate business challenges. And SOA can begin paying for itself quickly. In fact, the number of opportunities for quick return on investment can be surprising. For example, many businesses are unaware of the number of duplicate processes that occur in separate departments and applications—and how much these duplicate processes are costing them. When you examine the costs and lost revenue attributable to redundant function and duplicated effort, you begin to see the value of centralized services over having to manage multiple competing and overlapping functions.
Over the past couple of decades, factors such as mergers, regulations, global competition, outsourcing and partnering have resulted in a massive increase in the number of applications any given company may use. Even if these applications were developed in the context of a logical master plan, the situation could be difficult. But it is often the case that these applications were built with little knowledge of the other applications with which they would be required to share information in the future. As a result, many companies are trying to maintain IT systems that coexist, but are not integrated.
As companies use SOA to provide standardized services and business processes, the value of IT grows exponentially. When there is only one view of each customer, supplier and business partner, and only one view of each customer, supplier and business partner, and only one business process for each specific business need, organizations can run more smoothly and put more energy into growing their businesses rather than taming their IT infrastructures. In the past, the prevailing belief was that the value of reuse was in eliminating duplicate development and maintenance. Now, however, it is widely accepted that the true value of reuse is in the standardization of business processes.
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