Research: SOA Spending Set to Double in 2008
New
research out this week shows that the use of service oriented architecture
(SOA) is mushrooming within the typical business environment as organizations
begin to utilize the SOA ecosystem to cut down on the difficulty of changing
application systems to support changes in the business.
The
growth of SOA expanded by 100 percent last year and companies who did deploy
spent an average of $1.4 million on SOA projects in 2007 according to a study
released by AMR Research this week.
In an
interview with Baseline, the report’s author, Ian Finley, predicted
that 2008 could see enterprises funneling enough funds into SOA projects to
double SOA spending by year’s end.
“The
market is beginning to shift from it being dominated by first timers to people
who have done their first project and are now trying to ramp up,” said Finley,
who is research director for AMR. “I think that we're going to see the dollars
go up significantly as a result of that big slug of people who have just done
their first project. We could see it double by the end of next year.”
Finley’s
report showed that many 2007 early adopters of SOA primarily implemented it
through one-off pilot projects as a way to prove its usefulness in development
of business applications and processes. For the most part, these tests were
successful enough for most of these organizations to make plans to expand the
use of SOA in the next year.
“What
we've seen in the early adopters, once they get comfortable with the first project,
then they get enthusiastic and they want to use it in much more of the total IT
workflow,” Finley said.
According
to analysts at Gartner, SOA was used in more than 50 percent of large, new
applications and business processes in 2007. Gartner believes that by 2010 more
than 80 percent of large, new systems will use SOA in at least some part of
their design.
As
organizations begin to use SOA more prolifically throughout their environments
this year, Finley believes that they will encounter a few unique challenges
they may not have needed to contend with during limited use of these services.
“When you
get to the second and the third and the fourth project you won’t have 10 people
doing SOA, you’ll have 20 or 30 or 50, and then all of sudden you’ll realize,
‘Wait a minute. I need to somehow have a process for deciding what services
should be built and what services should be used and who is going to take care
of those services if I build a service
for a particular project and run it to solve a particular business problem,’”
he said. “If somebody comes along and starts using it for a new project, who is
paying for that? And who gets to decide how we're going to change it to make it
better?”
Research
released by Gartner last month showed that some enterprises are already
struggling with the reuse of services developed for specific business
processes.
“Some companies have been
disappointed by the low level of service sharing ("reuse") that they
have achieved. Some SOA projects have failed for a variety of reasons,
including unclear objectives, lack of coordination between business units
implementing SOA in isolation from each other and spending too much time
modeling interfaces without delivering working systems,” wrote Charles Abrams
and Roy Schulte in the Gartner paper. “Nevertheless, the majority of SOA
projects succeed, and most companies that have started using SOA continue with
it and expand their use of it.”
Finley
predicts that the issue of SOA governance to streamline SOA projects as they
become more common within organizations will become increasingly important this
year. Additionally, he believes that organizations that decide to throw
themselves into SOA full-force this year will need to make important decisions
about what technology will support their SOA efforts.
