Planning_and_Impleme.. - didier beck weblog

Planning and Implementing SOA
www.butlergroup.com
Large organisations tend to have a greater need for integrating applications and services across their
businesses. They are also more often challenged with unforeseen and changing dynamics created by M&A
activity, new partnerships, expansion, and new customer requirements. SOA promises to deliver the ability
to change and modify enterprise processes to match such changes
As might be expected,
Technology and
Financial Services are
the dominant verticals
in terms of SOA
adoption.
dynamically to business processes and activity. Smaller organisations may
either be less mature in their usage of technology, or may simply have fewer
business drivers that are forcing a review of alternatives such as SOA.
As might be expected, Technology and Financial Services are the dominant
verticals in terms of SOA adoption. They are heavily dependent on IT and are
sophisticated in terms of their IT adoption. Enterprises within these verticals
usually run a large number of applications and their operations are often
spread across various locations, meaning that the need to integrate processes
across platforms is a constant priority. They also have large, knowledgeable IT-departments and are
consequently less inhibited by new technologies. Other verticals, such as Healthcare, Manufacturing, and
the Public Sector, currently have lower SOA adoption rates, largely due to a more risk-averse approach to
the adoption of the latest technologies, but also likely to be related to other business drivers taking
precedence, and a lack of understanding.
Figure 8.1.2: SOA Adoption by Vertical (Source: Datamonitor)
Across different regions, the Datamonitor survey backs up discussions with various infrastructure and technology
vendors that implied that there is little difference in adoption rates, at least between the US and Europe, Middle
East, and Africa (EMEA) regions. Some 48% of positive respondents were based in the US and 42% in EMEA.
Vendor discussions imply that adoption rates are marginally higher in the US than in Europe, but most agreed
that adoption was probably lower than might be expected from the volume of hype that surrounds SOA.
The Web site eBizQ (www.ebizq.net)– which covers many integration-related issues – published a survey of
just over 300 of its members in October 2006. This indicated a rather more bullish uptake of SOA, with
28% of respondents claiming to have some services deployed, with another 21% considering themselves
to be in the pilot stages. A further 24% are currently exploring SOA. In most cases, of those organisations
that had deployed some services, there were fewer than ten in production, with Web services being the
most widely adopted service type; here there were a few respondents that had significantly more than ten
deployed services with some 10% having more than 100 in use. Again, Financial Services, Telecoms, and
Technology companies were at the forefront, backing up the Datamonitor findings (some 21 different
industries were represented in the response group). The main drivers for adoption were increased business
agility, IT reuse, business process optimisation, and composite application development (multiple responses
were permitted in the survey). This response did imply that the business was driving much of the adoption.
4 Section 1: SOA Deployment
December 2006