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soa Not SOA Is The Ticket

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In my last post I referred to a study my team was conducting around SOA and web services management patterns. The high-level purpose of the study was to gain insight around:

  • whether service-orientation practices were being used for building web services (as opposed to simply building a bunch of independent services),
  • what service-orientation practices were being used such as service discovery, governance, etc., and
  • if service-orientation practices were being used, was there a positive benefit to the business around agility, application availability, manageability, performance, and scalability

What I’m finding in the recent data is that in no case are companies taking on SOA as a strategic initiative, driven from the business or CIO. Rather, in most cases, those IT shops that see the value of service orientation and build service-orientation practices into their overall software delivery process demonstrate that value to their business constituents after they’ve shown the value of doing so.

That value is demonstrated mostly in the form of improved agility and an application’s quality of service. Interestingly, some customers have reported a degradation of scalability and/or performance (more on that in a subsequent post). Once that value is shown, the business embraces the idea and is willing to invest resources into it. For example, in all cases, customers responded that the number of web service implementations will increase in the coming year, in some cases significantly.

This is occurring despite most customers not adopting some of the core service-orientation practices such as service discovery or repository implementations. In those cases, it appears that it is just a matter of time and those organizations will adopt those practices at some point in the near future.

So, what’s your experience been? Have you seen measurable improvements in manageability, agility, quality of service, etc. or has it been a mixed experience.

More to come on this…

All the best,

Erik, Application Platform Lead, War on Cost

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    We've found that to date, most companies that are building web service-enabled capabilities are doing so out-of-context of any defined corporate strategy.  Like you, we also found that few companies are implementing enterprise-wide SOA practices including governance, security standardization, directories, etc.    Regardless, there are still some benefits here – if nothing else then being able to get rid of proprietary technologies like Tibco to tie together diverse application platforms.

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2013
    Pingback from soa Not SOA Is The Ticket | DELHiTECHiES