There are a bunch of ways to measure SOA success -- development hours spent on projects, speed of new product rollouts, deferred enterprise application upgrades, cost savings by switching from live customer service to self-service Web access.
But one company found a different way to gauge the progress of its SOA efforts -- by the reduced tonnage of the servers and infrastructure in its data center. "They calculated that by the time they were finished with their new SOA initiative, they would have eliminated six tons of iron in their data center!" observes Oracle VP and chief technologist Dave Chappell. I recently spoke to Dave to explore SOA ROI and other pertinent matters as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)
Dave keynoted the Forum with a discussion on how grid computing supports SOA scalability.
In the podcast, Dave discussed how companies can go about measuring ROI as they launch their own SOA endeavors. "It's usually about eliminating redundant systems -- that's the first place where folks start," he explains. "And then, the emphasis shifts to being able to go after new markets and so forth."
SOA metrics such as reduced hardware and IT cost reduction are relatively straightforward, but wider business benefits are more of a challenge to capture and measure, Dave says. "There's much less, much less of a tangible benefit and usually it takes a broader effort across the company to be able to measure. So that's a little harder but, you know, in the next year or so, we'll start to see more of those, where businesses are actually measuring how they are able to grow, based on the adoption of SOA."
Beyond ROI, the landscape is changing in terms of what companies want from SOA adoption. A few years ago, the industry focused largely on basic infrastructure and how to define service enablement. The discussion shifted to enterprise service buses and process orchestration.
Now the big challenge is how to address the necessary support functions to build out flexible, automated business processes to support SOA initiatives. Event-driven architecture and complex event processing are among those accompanying technologies, Dave explained.
As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry's top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.
Leave a comment