SOA shines as hype fades

By Jacob Nthoiwa for PricewaterhouseCoopers
Johannesburg, 09 Apr 2009

The extravagant vendor hype around service-oriented architecture (SOA) has died down, but the change is good for both SOA users and the reputation of the SOA approach, says Mauritz Kloppers, senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers

“Many major vendors confused the market by sending out the wrong SOA messages and relying too heavily on hype,” states Kloppers.

As a result, the true benefits of SOA went largely unrecognised. Vendors, who were too interested in selling their SOA products, confused the market by punting SOA architecture in purely technological terms, he says. “This gave the impression that SOA was all about IT.”

“In reality, SOA is a business architecture pattern with a specific mindset or orientation towards services, “ Kloppers points out. Far from being restricted to the IT domain, it involves common processes and services used by many different areas of an enterprise, he says.

According to Kloppers, the SOA approach breaks the organisation's operations down into small Lego-like blocks. When the environment changes - if a recession hits or an election causes panic - organisations can simply rearrange these blocks and quickly re-position themselves for the new challenges.

In the original rush to sell SOA, he says, vendors focused too much on the services layer of SOA, which connects the business processes to software applications. They implied that this is all SOA is.

Functional and flexible

Kloppers believes now that this hype has died down, SOA is finally coming into its own, leaving enterprises able to appreciate the many other things that SOA can do.

A shared service centre within an organisation is a good example of a service-oriented architecture, says Kloppers. “Business units each have their own unique set of processes but can call on common services offered by the SSC as part of these processes.”

Outsourcing non-core operations is another example of a SOA implementation - calling external services as part of the core operation in the business, he says.

“Whatever the application, SOA's key benefit is that it enables agility,” says Kloppers, which he adds is the essential survival tool in tough economic times. “Little wonder then that most large SA enterprises are now working on some kind of SOA project.”

Kloppers cautions that implementing the architecture is not quick. It involves not only infrastructure and services but also a new culture for many organisations.

How soon SOA can be implemented depends on how quickly the organisational culture can adapt to the task of breaking down its monolithic ways of working into the smaller, more flexible building blocks of SOA, he concludes.