'Best in Class' or 'Laggard'? New Studies Show Mixed SOA Progress

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August 16, 2007

'Best in Class' or 'Laggard'? New Studies Show Mixed SOA Progress

Two newly published studies show that some progress is being made on the road to SOA -- but the journey has only begun. That is, if Just a Bunch of Web Services is in New York, and SOA in Los Angeles, most companies are still somewhere in New Jersey. (That's okay -- New Jersey has some great beaches.)

Aberdeen Group recently surveyed about 400 companies and found that there is a split in the market, between those simply deploying Web services applications (which they call “SOA Lite”) and companies building out a full SOA middleware infrastructure. (A link to the report’s PDF file is here.) The survey is underwritten, in part, by BEA and Hitachi Consulting.

Overall, Aberdeen defined about 20% of the survey group as “best-in-class” enterprises. Another 50% were “average,” and at least 30% could be considered “laggards.”

The best in class companies have taken the lead with full SOA deployments — 56% report SOA-enabled middleware deployments, versus 45% with mainly Web services deployments (doesn’t equal 100% due to rounding). In contrast, only 11% of the laggard companies reported full SOA deployments, versus 43% mainly involved with Web services. (What are the remaining 46% doing? Who knows...)

SOA efforts have paid off well for these best in class companies, Aberdeen found. All of the BICs, 100%, say they saw reductions in their application development costs. By contrast, only 59% of the average companies could say this, along with 14% of the laggards. Likewise, while 89% of the BICs said customer satisfaction levels went up, this dropped to 69% among the average companies. Among our friends, the laggards, however, only 14% could claim increases in users satisfaction levels.

In addition, the BICs have adopted the SOA ethic in many other ways. At least 29%, for example, have deployed SOA governance software, compared to 17% of the average companies and 6% of the laggards. In addition, 61% of the BICs have retrained their application development teams in the SOA way — compared to 24% of the average companies and 29% of the laggards.

Surprisingly, there is one area the laggards are keeping up with the BICs, however — 33% within each group are employing new processes to test and assure the QA of their SOA applications.

In addition, another survey published by Evans Data also concludes that progress is being made, but most companies are still somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike. At least three-quarters of companies that have built or are building Web services now planning to implement SOA. At present, more than one in five have already built some kind of formal SOA for company-wide adoption.

However, the survey of 400 companies, for which I authored the final analysis report, confirms that most organizations are still somewhere in the transitional stage between JBOWS stage (Just a Bunch of Web Services) and SOA. In fact, most have not gotten their arms around the various pieces needed to make up SOA: governance and registries, ESBs business process management, and service sharing/reuse.

The Evans Data survey shows there is some progress in this direction – a significant segment of companies now are building services that can be reused and redeployed. In fact, more than 70% have experienced a cost saving as a result of code reuse and automation of processes. However, the survey also shows that few companies are ready in terms of governance and management of cross-enterprise services. Testing and validating Web services is the greatest challenge for developing an SOA, along with determining an ROI.

The Evans Data survey also found that SOA is no longer just a luxury available to high-end companies – it’s reaching commodity status as technology available to the mass market of companies, including small to medium-size organizations. For the first time in this survey series (conducted since 2003), open-source tools surpassed commercial products in Web services and middleware development.

The survey also finds increasing reliance on frameworks to move SOA forward. The survey finds that number of companies planning or executing SOA deployments on a Java Platform increased slightly during the last six months while those planning to build SOA implementations on .NET decreased by almost 20%. .NET deployments for SOA are still ahead, with 31% targeting that platform, but with 28% now expecting to target Java technologies; the rival platforms are virtually tied. Almost one in five companies are expecting to support both.

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