SOA in Five Years: More Enterprisey

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January 05, 2007

SOA in Five Years: More Enterprisey

Saugatuck Research has just released the results of a study which looked at the state of service-oriented architecture progress at this time, as well as make predictions about what's going to happen over the next five years.

Overall, the study's authors, Michael West, Bruce Guptill, and Mark Koenig -- all analysts at Saugatuck -- provide a fairly realistic assessment about what's going on with SOA, circa 2007. Namely, that SOA is plodding along much more slowly than one might think, given the hype that has been surrounding the architecture over the past year or so.

While the study is only based on interviews with 40 IT executives and application architects, Saugatuck explains that these were "deep-dive" interviews which really took a hard look at what these companies were actually doing, and how they were doing it.

Thus, perhaps the most revealing revelation of the study is that while many of the executives (15, or 37% of the bunch) initially described their projects as "service-oriented architectures," further probing revealed that these were actually collections of Web services, or early SOA pilots at best. As the Saugatuck analysts put it, "it became clear that many are merely managing a collection of Web services, and have yet to make a strong commitment to SOA as a management discipline — as opposed to an integration technology."

Another revelation to come out of the study is that most of these SOA projects are driven by technical or IT-centric purposes, rather than business purposes. The study finds that by a wide margin, cost reduction outdistances all other motivations to move to SOA by a two-to-one margin. In the study, 57 percent cite cost reduction, 27 percent cite code reuse (which is cost reduction), and only 23 percent expect to increase business agility from their SOA any time soon.

Interestingly, ebizQ's survey on SOA practices, conducted in September, found the opposite trend: business goals -- versus IT efficiency -- are driving most SOA deployments at this time. Almost two out of respondents, 64 percent, said that the goal of their SOA effort is to "increase business agility," followed by "IT reuse" at 57 percent. "Business process optimization" followed with 55 percent, and another 44 percent sought the advantages of composite application development.

However, both the Saugatuck and ebizQ surveys agree that most companies are still in the very early stages of SOA implementations. What will the next five years bring in SOA, then? The Saugatuck analysts advise us to be patient, as SOA will only grow through slow, steady progress.

The study's authors say that we are still wrapping up the "First Wave" of SOA (1999-2005), which consists of experimentation, pilots, and services confined to departments. We are currently in the midst of an overlapping "Second Wave" (2003-2009), in which SOAs are rolled out to serve departmental purposes. The coming "Third Wave" of SOA will be more an enterprise stage, in which services are shared across business units, and alas, business agility begins to be achieved. This stage will be realized by most companies by 2012.

The primary driver of SOA at this time -- cost reduction -- will not begin to kick in until Wave III, and that's likely top be overshadowed at that point by emerging business benefits such as agility. In fact, Saugatuck notes, don't expect any cost containment anytime soon with an SOA deployment: "Users must be prepared for their initial SOA projects to be as much as 100 percent more expensive – and to take longer – than traditional software development approaches."

That's where effective governance will make the difference. "The earlier you start Governance efforts, establish Centers of Excellence and launch an awareness program, the more likely you are to achieve the objectives of agility and business process flexibility when entering the third Wave of program-based enterprise-wide initiatives," the authors note.

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