Gartner's Schulte: How to Grow Your SOA

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November 18, 2006

Gartner's Schulte: How to Grow Your SOA

"Service-oriented architecture not really rocket science. Yes, it may be a little more complicated than past architectures, but people don't have to do it perfectly to succeed and still be able to met the needs of the company. You just have to do it well enough."

In his keynote address for the SOA in Action online conference, Gartner's Roy Schulte described the evolution of SOA within organizations, starting as a relatively simple engagement involving a small, non-mission-critical application, growing to complex organisms requiring involvement from all parts of the enterprise. (Replay is available here.)

In the pilot stage, a single pain point may be addressed, typically involving a small application, handling fewer than less than 10,000 transactions a day. The good news at this stage is that no special purchases need to be made for SOA. "When doing an architecture on this scale, you don't need to buy any special technology," Schulte said. "You can use technology purchased for other purposes."

In the next stage, companies will typically buy their first piece of SOA technology, which is typically an enterprise service bus, Schulte continued. "The scale is still generally small," he added, but there is a noticeable increase in complexity. "At this time the applications may be in the same business unit, but there may be multiple application application systems. You may be looking at multiple steps in a business process, rather than just using SOA within one step of the process."

It is at the third and fourth growth stages that SOA finally explodes on the enterprise scene, Schulte continued. The total number of services may grow past 500, and the " number of service calls or messages per day may reach up to close to a million," he said. Also, in a large enterprise, there may be at least 20 to 100 developers building SOA applications. "At this point, the approach to service oriented architecture "must become notably more systematic, processes must become more repeatable, and systematic tools.. are going to be needed," he said.

Ultimately, the goal is to make SOA as the "default architecture" within organizations. "That is, all new applications will be built using service oriented architecture," he said. However, he added, "very few companies are at this stage today. They may be there in five to eight years."

While the initial pilots and projects can be accomplished within the confines of the IT department, as the SOA grows and adds services, the need for business management support will increase as well. "Once you start spreading service oriented architecture, you will become visible in some cases beyond the IT department to the heads of business units, whose applications are being migrated to service oriented architecture. At this point, you need support from the chief information officer. There should be support all the way to the CEO and CFO."

Schulte also said that the nature of SOA is evolving, from a "conversational" process between service providers and consumer to a more "interactive" event-driven architecture. Typically, SOA has been set up as a "series of messages that go back and forth between the service consumer and provider," he explained."In an interactive SOA, the consumer is more in control. The order in which things are done is controlled by the consumer at each step."

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