SOA in Action Blog

There's been a lot of debate over how to best measure SOA success. The truth is, unfortunately, most companies don't have any metrics in place. They simply don't know what's working -- it just seems right, or anecdotally, people are saying good things about the service. The problem is, companies have no clue how well their SOA is working -- or if it needs recalibrating?

Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress Software, has a simple and direct way to measure SOA success -- the level of IT backlogs. I recently spoke to Hub as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)

In companies implementing SOA, the overall backlog of IT requests is starting to shrink, he says. Companies are seeing drastic reductions in project cycle times and consolidation in purchasing across the enterprise.

The decrease the IT backlog can be an interesting metric to judge the efficiency and ROI of the SOA implementation. Then, Hub suggests, look at the arrival rate and analyze the revenue stream from the line of business and look at the numbers in the reuse cycle. "If you see the batch rate going down and it becoming more of a continuous stream of delivery, those start to point to the loftier goals of reuse and agility," he says.

Hub also says there should be no doubt that the increased reuse of service and IT assets directly relates to the bottom line and business growth. SOA is now entering its second generation of deployment, he points out. "The first generation is where people were learning what SOA was and is. Getting in at a single-project level. And most of the work has been in adopting the interfaces and the methodologies and the new technology of SOA. Maybe some of those long-reaching goals aren't yet getting traction. But even at that level, the kind of things that we're seeing is that when customers apply SOA to what we call business change projects, things that have a very laser focus on achieving a specific business objective, then what we're seeing is two tangible measures, even in the short term."

Hub cited the example of a company that leveraged its buying power with SOA and is saving $40 million a year. "They were, in effect, buying all the raw materials at a corporate level across 136 plants." This purchasing power was consolidated into a single service. Now, vendors see the company as one entity, not 136, he explained. This enabled the company to basically reduce 40 million from the demand-side supply chain annually. SOA allowed them to achieve those kinds of benefits."

Besides aiding business agility, Hub predicts that SOA will usher in more event-driven architecture (EDA). SOA and EDA are two sides of the same coin, he says. "You'll see eventing-oriented applications, whether that's for real-time reporting, business activity monitoring or business event monitoring." The event-oriented model may eventually replace the idea of BPM, he predicts, but for now BPM is also here to stay.

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.