Research Report: "SOA Reality Check"

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Jan 20, 2007

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Enterprise Architecture

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SOA Adoption

Research firm Saugatuck Technology has released a report entitled “SOA Reality Check” that describes how and to which degree SOA is adopted in the field, namely among the 40 companies whose senior IT executives and IT architects were interviewed for the study.

In a freely available three-page document summarizing the report (PDF), the following key findings are highlighted (slightly edited for brevity):

• Most firms deploying SOA are focused either on early-stage planning, and/or trial deployment around legacy application integration.

• Of the thirty-seven percent of executives interviewed who indicated they are currently in a limited or full production stage of SOA deployment, many are merely managing a collection of web services, and have yet to make a strong commitment to SOA as a management discipline (as opposed to an integration technology).

• Implementers are taking a technology-led approach to SOA deployment, even though earlier research showed almost universal agreement that business needs to be in the lead

• The key long-term driver of SOA adoption – cost reduction – outdistances all others by a two-to-one margin. Unlike such technology revolutions of the past as client/server and minicomputers, users are also citing “code reusability” and “business agility” as strong secondary drivers of SOA.

According to Saugatuck, the three key inhibitors need to be overcome for successful SOA adoption are upfront cost, resource sharing and allocation, and SOA governance. Another finding was that typically, SOA adoption occurs in three “waves”:

The full report, which documents the three adoption waves, the promise of SOA, adoption trends, business drivers, inhibitors, lessons learned, and recommendations, is available via Saugatuck’s web site for $1,295.00 USD.

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