Evans Data reported that half of Enterprise software developers will be programming within an SOA environment in two years. And Gartner found that for big companies, those with more than 40,000 employees, that more than 67% are already using SOA.
But are all these numbers just hype? A report from Saugatuck Technology thinks that many of the reports are skewed too positively. Saugatuck says that what is being measured and presented as SOA adoption is really just a set of point solutions in departments or projects where web services have been deployed.
The report found that “while there are a few outstanding examples of enterprise SOA deployment — the fact that they are outstanding indicates how few examples there are.”
SOA has got center-stage attention of the enterprise, but the relatively high costs of implementation and the message that SOA will bring about corporate-wide change and innovation has many executives wary of the potential down-side risk that would come with such sweeping changes.
Further the positioning of SOA as a technology toolkit rather than as a business product or solution makes it harder to quantify the total ROI. Cutting-edge technology is great but what are the tangible business benefits?
To reduce risk, many companies have initiated small pilot projects. But the advantage of SOA comes when deployments are across the entire enterprise and intergrated with governance and well-defined processes. Enterprises with collections of isolated or silo-ed ‘SOA’ projects don’t provide the full potential of SOA. To adopt SOA is to adopt an enterprise-wide policy.
During the early implementation of SOA, enterprises will see increased IT costs, but long-term they will save money and make the organization much more efficient.
