The Virtuous Circle -- Why Registries Matter

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September 26, 2006

The Virtuous Circle -- Why Registries Matter

An SOA effort can bring about a "virtuous circle" of service development and reuse that can lead to impressive ROI. I recently had the opportunity to speak with David O'Connell, senior analyst at Nucleus Research. O'Connell had just authored a qualitative study on SOA and the use of registries, and had some interesting observations about this essential stage of SOA development.

Namely, that without a registry, an enterprise is unlikely to see ROI from its SOA project. But, registries are not common in the formative stages of SOA. "People generally adopt SOA in an incremental way. They typically first do it with a proof of concept project. At this point, a registry's not all that important."

However, as the SOA gains critical mass in the enterprise, a registry becomes vital, O'Connell added. "If you decide an SOA can do some powerful things for your company, then there are two paths. One path is to introduce a governance aspect through a registry. The other path is that either the CIO doesn't see the SOA coming, and ends up having lots of SOA assets out there, and not knowing exactly how they're getting utilized."

What O'Connell is saying jibes with my own research on the topic. Last year, working with Webservices.Org and Systinet, I helped put together a study of about 1,000 Web services and IT professionals, and found registry adoption is fairly low among most companies -- because most companies have just started exploring SOA.

Overall, a total of 48% of respondents said they either rely on informational methods or have no method at all of communicating the availability and location of a Web service. A quarter, 28%, said they have no method, and 28% communicated information about their Web services on an “informal” or “word-of-mouth” basis. About a third, 34%, will post information about their Web services on an intranet site.

Among advanced SOA sites however, registry adoption rises significantly, the Webservices.Org/Systinet survey found.. While 17% of companies early in the SOA game have a registry, this percentage soars to 44% among advanced users -- those deploying 20 more services on an enterprisewide, reusable basis.

As an SOA effort gains steam, and the number of available services increases, a registry can help promote reuse and sharing, and therefore significantly cut development costs. "As a result, increase the number of services that you have, and you have a virtuous circle, where the more services that you have, the more custom code development time you eliminate, and the higher the ROI is on your SOA," O'Connell points out.

In addition, he added, "registry can help you with governance by modifying who uses what services when, and also what business cases a particular service is applied to. What you don't want to have happen is have a service deployed or modified badly in such a way that it disrupts the operating environment, and even causes an application to shut down, lock data, or lock the functionality of the network. Then everybody would freak out, asking, 'What is this SOA thing? May be we should puts the brakes on it.' Registries can introduce control."

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us