Are You Being Played in the SOA Game Plan?
Vendors have heavily invested in service-oriented architecture, but they, too, have to reap a substantial ROI in a flailing economy. How are vendors positioning their new products and services? What's the pitch and, more to the point, should you buy it?
Fri, August 15, 2008
CIO — If you believe everything you hear, service-oriented architecture is taking over the world, and anyone not in the game is likely to be left on the sidelines. The move to SOA may indeed be inevitable, but it can be hard to accomplish in the current economic environment. Vendors are also struggling with heavy investments in SOA, and they, too, have to make a profit during this economic downturn. This begs the question of whether you truly need to score on the SOA front immediately—or are you just being played?
"Some vendors, those who were a bit too zealous regarding their expectations on volume and buy-in time lines, have ratcheted down the noise and focus on SOA," says Sandra Rogers, director of SOA, Web services and integration research at IDC Research (a sister company of CIO.com). "Meanwhile, other vendors—those who remain committed—are becoming a bit more realistic and mature about the pace and extent SOA will advance. Now they are [better] articulating how it can fit into overall IT strategies."
Vendors who were looking for a fast buck are changing their tune entirely. "Some vendors who promoted composite applications have just changed terminology to promote the same concepts under the banner of mashups," explains Rogers. "While this gains some additional attention, in some cases it may stall interest from those enterprises looking for greater stability to road map, vision and messaging from their vendors."
This sales approach can backfire on vendors. "They may appear to some businesses as more dispensable initiatives at this particular point in time," she says.
Regardless of how SOA is pitched, the payoff is generally real. "Reuse is easier to measure than strategic business benefits, especially in the early days, but the potential financial benefits of reuse are limited to cutting a percentage of your development budget, whereas the value of strategic business benefits is virtually unlimited," explains Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "So, reuse is a nice benefit and easy to quantify, but it is not the largest potential for SOA by any measure."
Unfortunately, this message gets lost in the pitch and is often even left out of the sales brochure. "SOA is marketed and sold totally different outside the U.S.," reveals Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. "Here, it's all about reuse; in South America, South Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, it's about business processes. I have faith that the U.S. will eventually catch up."
Given the different pitches by time zone, is the interest in SOA globally high?
