SOA here to stay

Johannesburg, 18 Aug 2006

While businesses grapple with service-oriented architecture (SOA) and maturing their application of the architecture, at least one analyst sees its principles remaining effective for the next decade.

Forrester senior analyst Henry Peyret said SOA is not a buzzword; instead, it is here to stay. However, he warned that smaller companies may shy away from the architecture. "SOA as a term may end, but the best practices will remain."

Peyret told the ITWeb SOA and Web Services conference yesterday that one of the drivers is the need for companies to trim time to market with new products. "Agility is becoming more important in large enterprises."

This, and its ability to build on existing applications, are reasons why he believes the principles behind the architecture will hold true for at least the next 10 years. SOA also enables new needs for existing applications, supports new channels and trims business-to-business costs.

Peyret said SAP has already launched Enterprise SOA, which will go into the implementation stage early next year. Following on from this development, Forrester sees digital business architecture as the next development on SOA.

Its Web site defines this as an architecture that allows diverse IT domains to work together as one. "Building a digital business architecture means capturing business processes and policies as metadata and combining diverse trends like business process management (BPM), SOA, unified communications, and utility computing into a coherent model."

Building on from this, and landing around 2015, is a concept Forrester calls the organic business. This architecture, said the research company, adapts to the on-demand needs of business. It will also aid in reducing time-to-market and results in embedded business services in customers` and suppliers` operations under direct business control as business services move online.

Today`s concerns

However, at the moment companies are investigating maturity models and other tools that will enable the implementation of SOA. Peyret commented that while many companies have maturity models, one such as that in place at HP is unique.

The model combines technological maturity with a business`s needs to become more agile. Head of the SOA Competency Centre Luc Vogeleer said the company has developed a maturity model that looks at eight domains in the organisation, as well as five levels of maturity, which allows for technological planning.

HP has also developed an agility model, which allows businesses to tackle the areas in which they are not agile on an urgent basis. Vogeleer said companies often turn to SOA when there is a business imperative such as a merger, a new product or restructuring.

The company is in discussions with IDC to determine how this two-year roadmap for implementing SOA can be made available online, he said.