SOA in Action

In physics, they say the simplest solution to a problem is usually the right solution. Applying the laws of physics to SOA, then, it stands to reason that enterprise service buses (ESBs) are the simplest path to SOA within organizations -- and perhaps in many cases, the right path for the organization.

There's been plenty of concern that an economic downturn would skim already bare-bones IT and integration budgets; therefore making it more difficult to launch SOA initiatives that cut across the enterprise. ESBs are a vehicle that can help break the "complex links directly between applications, which are reducing agility, and consuming chunks of the IT budget just in maintenance," says IBM's Lief Davidson.

Lief recently sat down with ebizQ's own Peter Schooff to discuss how SOA managers can employ ESBs to get around any budget crunches incurred from today's tough economy. (Link to transcript and audio file here.)

"The business needs to become simpler and faster to address the various business problems and, hopefully, with a reduction of the complexity that IT is being bound into today, more of the budget can actually be spent in delivering innovative new value rather than keeping existing systems running." This is where ESBs come in, Lief said.

There's been a lot of discussion across the industry as to how far organizations that don't necessarily have the resources or executive political can pursue SOA. Add budget crunches, and SOA becomes an impossible sell -- even though it does provide cost savings and containment in the long run. ESBs may provide a way to kick-start SOA in any climate.

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I recently had the opportunity to host an ebizQ Webinar on managing SOA performance with Forrester's Randy Heffner and AmberPoint's Ed Horst.

SOA has a lot of moving parts, and digging down to spot the root cause of a service problem is not always easy. SOAs are multilayered creatures. Is it the service itself that's creating an issue? Is it the database? Is it one of the servers?

As Randy put it:

"We’re talking about managing complex SOA services. So we’re diving into an advanced topic that comes up as you realize how deep your service implementations can go, and as you realize some of the dependencies that happen between the various components behind the implementation of your service. Your SOA management solution however you construct it and buy it must handle SOA-based service requests that have complex service implementations."

Randy says when troubles arise with services in SOA, it's often a challenge to pinpoint the source of the troubles, and a number of teams may get involved in the process of identifying issues -- and not have the big picture. Now, Heffner says, "great, we’ve identified there’s a problem with a service, who we going to call?" With complex SOA implementation, and multiple teams, the only answer that will be coming from everyone within their respective teams saying, "it's not me -- my stuff is working fine." That's because everyone has a view limited to their piece of the infrastructure, Randy says.

SOA management tools need to address "deep service" management, Randy pointed out. SOA management tools all do a fairly good job of altering administrators to problems with a service. Even in a complex service implementation -- it could be Java, .NET, messaging middleware, or legacy connectors -- when trouble is afoot, a good management tool will do a good job of sending an alert out.

Randy urges configuring SOA management strategies and solutions to conduct "deep service management." Typically, SOA management solutions employ solutions that don't look beyond the SOAP interface. A new generation of tools that are emerging, however, that can look beyond the service interface to the databases, services, and messaging layers beneath.

SOA management should be able to handle a variety of SOA deployments, ranging from services that invoke Java Message Service, MSMQ, Java RMKI, or CORBA, to ESBs or app servers. Many deep service SOA management approaches can start with agents that many SOA management solutions provides, Heffner said. Then, there are also an increasing number of management solutions that run natively on various platforms.

They key is to employ these solutions -- with or without agents -- to gain better visibility into the systems behind the services, he said. "SOA management solutions may have various ways to construct or correlate a picture, such as dropping tags into a message... or, you might have to do a little work in the configuration..." As services arise, problems will be better isolated, and administrators will know which team to call for assistance. Such deep service management also delivers benefits beyond root cause analysis, such as capacity management.

Randy makes the following recommendations for achieving deep service management:

"Formulate your SOA management strategies; how you’re going to do successful SOA management before you start thinking about products to do SOA management.... You have to deeply know the technologies, know how complex your implementations are. Will your SOA solutions will be able to help you manage your services across the technologies? Will your SOA management solution be able to tie together the complexity and correlate the complexity?

"...Build deep SOA monitoring and management into your whole overall SOA management. It has to do with the design of your architecture, and all the elements that are part of the implementation of your services, and everything that's behind your service interfaces. Build deep service monitoring criteria into your product selection criteria as you are selecting SOA management solutions. ...Think in terms of orchestration engines, integration products, application servers, SOA applications, repository, and SOA management. Think of them and SOA management as one cohesive SOA management platform.

"So you need to understand the relationships and connections. The bottom line is to think about deep service management as you’re pursing your solution."

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For years, the disciplines of enterprise integration -- followed by SOA -- have always been perceived as "hard and techie." This has made discussions with the business process management (BPM) side of the house difficult.

Now, thanks to the introduction of new lightweight approaches via Web 2.0, SOA, BPM, and integration are now becoming more flexible, user-driven methodologies.

David Linthicum recently spoke with Dr. Dale Skeen, founder of Vitria, a well-established integration vendor, about this shift. (The podcast is here, and a transcript of Dave's discussion with Dale Skeen is available for viewing here.)

This is part of SOA moving into its next generation -- "the next great leap going together is really leveraging three very important technologies in the enterprise -- SOA, BPM and Web 2.0," Dale said. While these three areas are seen as separate technologies or methodologies, Dales sees their inevitable convergence into what he calls an "enterprise platform."

First of all, Dale said, SOA and BPM have always been a natural pairing. "SOA is an enabler that allows you to access business functions, and services, and data universally. BPM is a higher level that orchestrates these business services and human interactions in ways that allow you to meet a business objective. So hence, I've always considered these to be the perfect complementary technologies to work together."

Now, Web 2.0 is bringing SOA-BPM closer to the end user, Dale said. "SOA brings this universal access to services and data through the SOA enablement tools. It does in a secure, manageable, and governed fashion. Now, Web 2.0 brings rich internet interfaces, rich user experiences based on technology such as AJAX and Flex, which are universally available in your Web browser."

"Application integration is hard, and very techie. Web 2.0 allows this notion of mashups where you let users sort of integrate in a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-do fashion."

These are all new trends that are shifting IT empowerment to the business end user, Dale added. "Simple things like mashups, we're talking visual layering of information, we're talking about collaboration technologies such as instant messaging. All of these have a role in enterprise software. And actually, the introduction of that can be very exciting for both the IT and the business side."

IT professionals need not fret over this shift, however, Dale said. "It means that IT will be able to do faster technology upgrades because of that, they have more control over the server aspect of it, and the client side they don't have to worry about. They're going to be able to lower the support costs and it also brings fundamentally new deployment models such as Software-as-a-service, which we think, is going to be a fundamental part of business IT going forward."

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In his latest post, ebizQ analyst Peter Schooff spoke with Anne Thomas Manes about the insecurity that continues to nag at SOA. (Transcript and podcast link here.)

This is an issue that's not getting near enough attention, Anne points out. Ironically, securing SOA is not a big deal, as it employs the same mechanisms used to secure Web services and Websites. Actually, Anne pointed out, "at this point, I think it’s really easy to secure your environment. You just have to use different practices than what you would probably do just for your Websites... Any platform that support Web services has the ability to support WS-Security."

And, as with Web services and Websites, applications or systems may be vulnerable to outside intrusions. "With services, you’re exposing business processes within your organization," Anne says. "If you don’t properly secure those interfaces to those business processes, you’re now letting anybody in the world come in and access them." Too many companies think that having those services contained within a well-protected firewall will do the trick. But, as she points out, these are intended to only protect point-to-point connections.

"If there is a URL that provides access to a service, chances are somebody’s going to be able to connect into it," Anne cautioned. "And the -- the idea that your perimeter is actually going to protect your internal systems is pretty dangerous at this point."

What to do? The best practice for SOA security is to enable security to be applied uniformly and automatically across all services deployed or run within the SOA, versus trying to build in security for each separate service.

Anne said that a layered defense will better protect SOA-based transactions and underlying data. "Use a combination of security protections when you’re dealing with a service-oriented system," she said. "You use the traditional periphery type of security measures, you also use identity-based security measures at the endpoints, and then potentially you use additional intermediaries to perform additional security capabilities like auditing, or cross domain, credential mapping and things like that."

Plus, she said, look into technologies from XML gateway vendors or from Web services management vendors "which will automatically protect your services for you, and automatically configure the kind of management and security protections that you want, such that you don’t have to do a whole bunch of effort every single time you deploy a service."

Emerging approaches also include new OASIS specifications such as WS-Federation, and “WS-Secure Conversation” that "gives you an additional layer of security by enabling two communicating service endpoints to establish a secure connection... a more efficient way of establishing a secure conversation so that you don’t have to authenticate on each interaction."

In a Webinar I moderated last fall, Anne also raised another important point that needs to be addressed better by enterprises: that all too often, the burden of security is left on the shoulders of IT or integration teams, and therefore not getting the holistic view required to be effective. SOA brings this issue even more to the fore, since the goal is to provide service-enablement across the enterprise, well beyond the walls of IT.

You can get answers to your specific SOA Security questions from four of the top experts in distributed-computing security at this Webinar. Join Fred Etemadieh, co-chair of The Open Group's SOA and Security Project, Gunnar Peterson of Arctec, Andrew Brown of AmberPoint and moderator Mike Rothman of Security Incite on Wednesday, February 27, 12:00 p.m. ET for the special Roundtable that will key on the to discuss the most effective initial precautions (including using existing identity and access management) systems and long-terms strategies to keep your SOAs safe.

Find out more, submit a question or register here.

Check out submitted questions that will be covered here.

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What lessons have we learned from SOA that can be applied to Web 2.0? Plenty. But perhaps the most important is the role of governance, so organizations can get the most out of the services that are created under their roofs.

ebizQ colleague Gian Trotta recently spoke with Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager with HP Software, who worries that end users may be running away with Web 2.0-based services as end-runs around busy IT departments. (Listen to the complete podcast here, or see the transcript here.)

She notes that IT departments are dealing with "meaty back office problems" but end users are sometimes too impatient to wait for IT departments and their planning processes. So they take their needs into their own hands with new approaches like mash-ups and Web collaboration.

IT is caught up in issues such as "'how do I leverage the legacy infrastructure structure,' 'how to do I change my point-to-point integration into more flexible, loose coupling, more dynamic.' 'how do I break up my application silos'? They’re using serious architectural disciplines such as identifying their key reusable components and exposing those as standard space services."

What is happening on the user end is that "creative end users don’t have the time or the patience to wait for this plan to meticulous processes," Emo explains. "So they’re taking their needs into their own hands and using approaches, kind of Wild West approaches like mash-ups and Web collaboration."

But don't worry -- it's all good, Emo says. "These mash-ups in many cases are resulting in big productivity gains," she says. And these productivity gains "are getting the attention of the VPs of the business domains -- the folks with the money," she points out. "And they’re coming back to IT and saying 'make it so' -- support this application."

So the ball eventually ends up in IT's court anyway. The key is that IT will embrace the new "Wild West of Web 2," but pay attention to governance, Emo says. "They can embrace this capability. And they can make it work using the same level of robustness, the same level of service, quality of service. Or they can put up roadblocks and say, 'no, I am not going to let this rogue capability into IT.'

The best bet for managing Web 2.0 approaches, Emo says, is to "combine it with the productivity and architectural best practices of SOA. Effectively, what IT is doing is combining innovation and discipline. And the concept behind this is what HP is calling 'implicit governance.'"

The good part about implicit governance is that Web 2 consumers are "not even aware that they’re participating in an IT governance process, but in essence they are," Emo relates. "They’re assured of getting the service that they just basically have grown up to expect -- the always-on capability."

Emo will be speaking on this issue in a presentation called "Enterprise Mash-Ups for Wall Street: Leveraging SOA Web 2.0" at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street show set for February 11.

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Increasingly, industry analysts and practitioners are connecting the dots between three emerging megatrends -- SOA, Web 2.0, and Business Intelligence. It's becoming increasingly clear that the combination of SOA and Web 2.0 technologies is changing the face of business intelligence.

These were the topics raised at a recent ebizQ Webinar -- which I had the opportunity to moderate -- with noted author Don Tapscott, Katrina Coyle, BI manager with Molson Canada, and SAP's Lothar Schubert. (Audio replay available here.)

Don Tapscott, who broke new ground in 1996 with his book, The Digital Economy: The Promise and Peril of Network Intelligence, and recently co-authored Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, said BI is on the verge of a revolutionary transition, thanks to SOA and Web 2.0 approaches to technology innovation.

"Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture are really becoming a new mode of production," he says. "They’re changing the ways that we innovate, the ways theat we make decisions, the ways that we collaborate, and the ways that companies engage with the rest of the world."

This has very profound implications for business intelligence, which is evolving into "collaborative intelligence." Don continued. "Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 methodologies, he explained, internal data had "been accessible in various limited ways through traditional ERP reporting systems, MIS and business intelligence."

"The marriage of this new accessible data with the firm’s traditional internal data creates an unprecedented challenge, as well as an opportunity to gain insight into the behavior of the company’s most important stakeholders, and to translate that knowledge into success in the marketplace."

The speed of Web 2.0 processes is also changing what end-users expect from BI approaches as well. "Think about if you do a Google search, you get the results back instantly. If the results took half a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, you’d probably stop using Google so much. Traditional BI was kind of like that -- which is part of why we didn’t use it so much Because you’re calling out to a disk, basically." In-memory technologies are also making new generation BI technologies lightning fast as well.

Molson's Katrina Coyle also credits SOA with reshaping her company's ability to compete in a fast-changing and often fickle market. "One of the terrific things that we’ve had in the last year is service oriented architecture," she explained. "We can now deliver information to our business in any way they want…. we can drive information through emails, text, BlackBerries, and widgets. If we have issues anywhere in the supply chain, we can get that information out in real time to supply chain managers."

As with many SOA endeavors, corporate culture presents some barriers and challenges. "We’ve been brewing beer for a very long time," Katrina noted, stating that "when you’ve been doing something as long as we have, you get a lot of habits that are pretty well ingrained. Trying to shaking the business out of those habits is a challenge."

Molson's strategy to transform its organization includes reaching out to a new generation of younger adults through Web 2.0-based marketing strategies, and leveraging service-oriented architecture and data warehouse approaches to build its brands across the globe.

An important emphasis is real-time analytics, Katrina said. "We are constantly having to shift and change and shift and adjust very quickly to changes in the marketplace, " she explained. "We all have to be extremely agile. You can’t spend a week trying to figure out whether the promotion is successful. You have to be able to react within hours."

It used to be that companies didn't know if a promotion was successful until then end of a quarter, if then. Real-time analytics can look at patterns and trends and provide insights if something is working or not, enabling a quick change in direction.

For example, one trend that Molson was able to jump on fairly rapidly was a sudden craze for cold beer in UK pubs -- long bastions of warm beer. Katrina explained that each of its global sites have their own go-to-market models, but all this information needs to be rapidly assimilated. "We have a data warehouse, with lots of information coming in different ways," she said. "It's not necessarily all coming from a centralized ERP system. We also have data coming in from AC Nielsen, for example. "We’ve got to bring that data in, and make sure that it has a harmonized look, so our business can actually make tactical decisions on it."

By adopting in-memory technology available through SAP's BI Accelerator, Katrina reports that Molson has been able to move data quickly through its data warehouse. "We’re able to process data now in real time in our warehouse -- we’re not tied to a load once a day or once a week."

Audio replay of the ebizQ Webcast, "The New Paradigm for Business Intelligence - Collaborative, User Centric, Process Embedded," is available here.

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As far as SOA is concerned, the days of exploration, speculation, and tire-kicking are over. It's time to get down to business.

SOA implementations no longer focus on prototypes and proof of concept, says Accenture’s David Nichols. Instead of seeking technology-centric solutions, companies are focused on addressing new capabilities or improving business processes.

I recently spoke to David 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.)

From David's' vantage point, the footprint of SOA projects is growing significantly. "One thing that we'’ve noticed in the last 18 months or so is that our clients -- especially the early adopters -- have been rapidly evolving and increasing their SOA footprint," he relates. "Accenture’s high performers IT research reveals some very, very interesting trends to us. About half of the clients and companies that we consider to be high performers are currently looking at implementing an SOA-based architecture within the next 12-18 months -- evolving away from the prototype and the proof of concepts into true SOA-based architectures."

And SOA is increasingly about getting down to business, in the literal sense. "The interesting thing about this is a lot of these clients are not looking for a better technology or technology-centric solution, they’re focused on addressing new capabilities within their organization, or closing the gaps between some business processes that they may not be performing at the level that they would like them to perform," David says.

The goals of these SOA projects include "bringing products to market quicker, opening up new capabilities within their business, and being able to bring those to market a lot quicker and truly optimizing the way that they run their business."

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.

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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.

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There's been a lot of debate across the industry as to whether SOA works best when rolled out through smaller, targeted projects, or as part of a broader enterprise effort.

For Pat Walsh, VP of marketing for IONA, there's no question as to which approach delivers the best results -- SOA is strongest when you start small and scale fast. I recently spoke to Pat on where SOA ROI is being seen as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)

A small, manageable project can demonstrate how SOA principles reduce time to market, building support for a larger implementation. After scaling SOA throughout the organization, companies see reduced time to market and greater efficiency through service reuse. Don't "boil the ocean for building out SOA within the organization," Pat advised. "Start with something that is manageable. And demonstrate how SOA principles can affect time to market of that little project and see the direct benefits that it provides to the business."

"What tends to happen then is that you get great support from both IT and the business and then you can scale out the overall SOA solutions that you have."

Pat points to one particular customer in the telecom space that followed this principle. "They now have a dominant position," he explains. "They reused systems that they had used for plain old telephone service and for high-speed IP connectivity amongst their corporate clients and repositioned those services to create a voice-over-IP solution."

In addition to greater scalability, Walsh says IONA's customers are seeing ROI from SOA in both hard and soft kinds of costs. SOA implementations reduce the need for large outlays of hardware and software stacks and also enable greater leveraging of existing resources, meaning greater success rates and faster completion times for business projects.

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.

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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.

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It's clear SOA is showing many benefits to IT operations, improving developer productivity through reuse, and making it unnecessary to change 50 interfaces when a customer wants a change. But how much of an impact is SOA having on the business itself?

That's the question I sought to answer in a series of podcasts with industry experts, published as part of the recent InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum. In my first podcast chat (MP3 link here), I talked with Theo Beack, vice president of engineering and deputy CTO at BEA Systems, about what kind of business benefits are being seen as a result of SOA.

Theo explained that there are some instances where SOA helped stave off bankruptcy, and thrive through a renewed vigor in customer service. Adopting SOA to address customer satisfaction helped a California-based energy company better listen to its markets, Theo explains. “They were able to reduce infrastructure and cut support costs substantially. They were able to standardize their infrastructure to support this initiative, and accelerate their time to market with very creative solutions for the customer. In the past, their level of customer satisfaction was not very positive.”

This is a case in which SOA is being adopted in support of new business initiatives — such as attracting new customers or retaining existing ones. Customer service is just one area ripe for service-oriented systems.

How does a company know how much of a difference SOA is making? Theo also pointed out that ROI measurement can be elusive, however. However, this is a problem that had been around long before SOA came on the scene. "For IT organizations that have a very strong alignment with business, it's much easier to measure ROI. It's a struggle that is going through all over the world. It's not so much as a result of SOA -- organizations need to better align with IT and these IT initiatives with its portal, with its ERP system, with its SOA -- all of these initiatives really are being undertaken to support the business. And if there's a good alignment, it's much easier to measure the ROI."

Theo reports seeing many customers working within a BPM context. “I would say that a substantial percentage of our customers have either implemented BPM already or are doing it as part of the overall IT optimization strategy,” he says. “Most of them find that, as a result of the SOA work, it’s really possible for them to automate their processes.” More and more customers are moving from applications-centric to process-centric solutions, better leveraging existing applications and increasing efficiency.

Event-driven architecture is another area of growing interest, Theo pointed out. EDA is still in its earlier days, but companies are starting to include EDA in their SOA strategies, particularly companies that have a real-time type of environment and mature SOA implementation. “EDA then becomes a natural extension of the existing work that they’ve done over the last three, four, five years,” he explains.

Governance remains a key area of importance, and sometimes those challenges are related to more than just technology. “Every single organization where they’ve implemented governance, there is a different pattern and a different spin on how they successfully implement it,” Theo says. “And that success is totally based on the dynamics of the culture of the respective organizations.”

Theo cites three key challenges companies face in motivating employees to follow governance rules: low visibility, low adoption, and lack of automation. He suggests that, in order to overcome these respective challenges, companies set up a central repository to attract, capture, and analyze use of assets. "For SOA visibility, set up a central repository where you can attract the assets, capture them, see how they are being used and tied to that is the SOA implement is where management capabilities to monitor your fabric, to gain insight in what's been deployed, how they've been used, how they are performing."

Theo also recommends that companies balance positive and negative reinforcement in order to encourage project teams to comply with governance standards, such as by tying bonus incentives to compliance with governance standards

Listen to my entire interview with BEA's Theo Beack here. (MP3)

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.

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