SOA Technology Enters the Mainstream
SOA Technology Enters the Mainstream - Integration -
April 18, 2006 10:34AM
Although SOA certainly has crossed the chasm, there is still work to be done before the technology settles into a steady-state maturity. For example, respondents in a recent survey were divided on what constituted the best strategy for deploying SOA.
Every new technology goes through an early shakeout stage before it crosses the chasm, where it is adopted by mainstream organizations. It's safe to say that service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the services-based approach to information systems have crossed the chasm and are ready for prime time.
According to a recent survey by Research Concepts LLC of Berlin, MA, SOA has already been deployed at more than 50 percent of their organizations. Thirty-three percent have implemented at least one project, and another 20 percent are in the process of implementing their first, while 30 percent are planning an SOA implementation. Only a small minority, 16 percent, have no SOA in their plans. That puts SOA squarely in the I.T. mainstream.
Companies are turning to SOA, according to the survey, for the numerous benefits it delivers for both I.T. and the business itself, starting with greater business process flexibility. Other benefits include greater adaptability of applications, shorter time to deploy new applications, and increased reuse of application components.
Reuse has the potential to deliver substantial hard-dollar savings over time, while faster application deployment enables the organization to quickly seize opportunities. More than half the respondents (58 percent) cited increased customer satisfaction as a primary driver of SOA.
FirstMerit Corp, a financial service firm based in Akron, OH, initially turned to SOA to revamp its Internet banking channel. The services approach allowed it to quickly make its hard-to-use mainframe functionality accessible to customers through the Internet and the Web, explains Larry Shoff, executive vice president and CTO.
The ease with which the company could do that, however, opened up an entirely new opportunity for the company: small-business Internet banking. "We could take what we had done for Internet banking and quickly turn it into a new banking product for small business," says Shoff. That is the power of the SOA approach.
Although SOA certainly has crossed the chasm, there is still work to be done before the technology settles into a steady-state maturity. For example, survey respondents were divided on what constituted the best strategy for deploying SOA. Although 26 percent opted to mix and match SOA products from multiple vendors -- the best-of-breed approach -- almost an equal amount (23 percent) are turning to a single provider for an integrated solution. Even more (29 percent) use a combination of approaches.
FirstMerit, for example, relied primarily on a single vendor, DataDirect, which provided the tools and middleware to turn mainframe applications, primarily CICS functions, into Web services that could be assembled into Microsoft .NET applications by the company's developers. The results were standards-based Web services using WSDL and SOAP.
Despite the success of many companies with SOA, some challenges remain. The biggest of these is security, cited by 66 percent of survey respondents. Other challenges cited by respondents included performance (59 percent), compliance and governance (58 percent), and enforcement of business rules (53 percent).
Standards are critical to the success of SOA. SOA works because it provides a standardized way to access functionality and exchange data that otherwise reside within incompatible systems.
Although key SOA standards, such as SOAP, WSDL, XML, and UDDI, are in place, more are needed. The vast majority of survey respondents (93 percent) felt that the industry needs to speed up the development of standards. Not surprisingly, then, where SOA projects failed to meet expectations, just over half the respondents (51 percent) attributed the problem to insufficient standards.
The best practices for SOA success, according to industry analysts, are straightforward. They include the need to define the business value at the outset, identify enterprise-wide reusable services, focus on the architecture, and plan for security and governance from the start.
Even though more needs to be done, SOA clearly is ready for enterprise prime time, according to the survey respondents. Already large, leading financial services firms have deployed SOA applications that securely handle a million or more transactions a day with the kind of performance and reliability customers expect. Pretty soon everyone will be doing that.
April 21, 2006 at 07:37 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
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