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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
www.butlergroup.com Planning and Implementing SOA Quocirca, a UK-based market research company, paints a rather less rosy picture. In a rather larger sample (some 1,500 respondents) that was surveyed in research sponsored by Oracle earlier in 2006, around 30% claimed that they did not understand what SOA was. A further 25% said they had minimal knowledge of it, and only 20% stated they had a fair understanding or a good working knowledge of what SOA is all about. The respondents in this research were a mixture of technical and business people, which may explain the low levels of understanding to an extent – but the lack of SOA awareness is worrying given that for SOA to be a successful strategy, it must have business sponsorship. The Quocirca research shows that less than 10% of respondents’ organisations already had a SOA infrastructure, and 17% had no plans at all to look at one. Nearly 30% saw the move as being too difficult based on their existing infrastructure – indicating that where there is understanding, the concern is that there will be significant infrastructure requirements. This implies that the vendor-centric emphasis of SOA to date is turning people off the idea, and there is a limited understanding of the benefits of SOA. ...research shows that less than 10% of respondents’ organisations already had a SOA infrastructure, and 17% had no plans at all to look at one. A final survey, which has the benefit of indicating changes in responses over time, comes from Evans Data Corporation, conducted during the spring of 2006 across almost 400 managers and developers. This was focused on Web services development, and indicates that from 2005 to 2006 the percentage of functioning SOA implementations has almost doubled. The survey showed that 24% of respondents claim to currently implement SOA, an 85% increase over 2005. It also indicated that the number of Web services in use is also rising, with 30% of respondents anticipating that they will be using more than 20 services in the next year, a 58% increase from today. Performance, especially relating to reliability and availability, was seen as a serious concern here. Staffing issues, security concerns, and a lack of awareness of SOA are inhibiting SOA adoption. Given the varied adoption rates across the market, a number of common reasons emerge as to why adoption has not taken off in reality as much as some pundits are claiming. Figure 8.1.3: Obstacles to SOA Adoption (Source: Datamonitor) December 2006 Section 1: SOA Deployment 5
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