Service-oriented architecture (SOA) providers are advising companies to carefully assess individual situations before implementing SOA for its own sake.
"There are a number of critical areas of runtime governance that must be addressed in order to guarantee a successful deployment and avert a disaster," says Steve Pope, regional director of AmberPoint.
"Key areas of capability, activity and assets need to be in place for an enterprise to successfully adopt and operate an SOA," notes Luc Vogeleer, head of the SOA competency centre at HP.
Also, while SOA offers organisations the ability to rapidly respond to evolving business requirements by leveraging value-add processes as discrete services, the competitiveness of the enterprise is very much dependent on the availability and quality of the services delivered, according to Fred Gedling, CTO for EMEA at DataSynapse.
He elaborates: "For example, Wachovia, one of the leading global banks, has brought the benefits of virtualisation to its most critical transactional applications by creating utility infrastructure for virtual processing. This solution has enabled the bank to achieve a seven-figure cost avoidance and operational cost impact, while improving growth efficiency by 30%.
"With unprecedented service level management control available at runtime, it has also seen a five-fold improvement in application responsiveness and a 50% increase in throughput. This kind of saving is typical of the benefits that virtualisation can bring to SOA and Web services initiatives."
Gedling, Pope and Vogeleer are part of the line-up of international and local speakers at the ITWeb SOA and Web Services 2006 conference, which covers a diverse range of topics from implementation roadmaps and maturity models to frameworks for Web services trust, virtualisation and SOA governance.
Willie Appel, VP and programme director of Gartner Africa, and Henry Peyret, senior analyst at Forrester, will deliver conference keynotes. Debbie Claassen, IT architect at Metropolitan Life, and Kerry Anderson, process analyst at Standard Bank, will provide first-hand user perspectives on implementation challenges and considerations.
The conference takes place on 16 and 17 August at Gallagher Estate, Midrand.
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