Major problems facing organisations are the high cost of software maintenance and lack of interoperability, coupled with the high cost of change, said Willie Appel, Gartner VP and programme director.
Physically deploying and changing software is approaching the cost and complexity of deploying and changing hardware, he added.
Appel was speaking at the Oracle service-oriented architecture (SOA) executive forum held in Rosebank yesterday.
The total cost of software, Appel explained, breaks down into 20% for initial development and 80% for maintenance. The expenditure on maintenance consists of 20% for corrective maintenance, 20% for adaptive maintenance and 60% for evolutionary maintenance.
Since two-thirds of the total cost of software is due to changing requirements, the software development lifecycle should be renamed "software evolution lifecycle", he said.
"The result is less innovation, with conventional wisdom dictating that SOA is the ultimate solution to this problem.
"Conventional wisdom is wrong, services alone are not the solution. The middleware thinking that got us into this problem will not be the thinking that gets us out of it."
However, SOA radically simplifies interoperability and the ability to evolve and spans the gulf between edge and core technologies, Appel said. SOA also evolves into reflective (self-oriented) architecture and redefines both business and IT.
Dynamically adaptable
[VIDEO]He told delegates that an SOA is an inter-network architecture that should be interoperable and not tied to a particular platform architecture; should integrate "on the fly" using a network of intermediaries; and should be generic, underlying a wide range of new applications to maximise shared use.
"SOA should also be federated, simple and extensible, making it easily and dynamically adaptable to new uses and implementations."
In addition, organisations should ensure its SOA enables interoperability between the past, present and future.
"If SOA can really crack the interoperability code, then it can crack the 'evolvability` code.
"Most organisations make the mistake of not commoditising technology as it migrates to the core. This leaves them with a proprietary core, where the least 'business visible` benefit is. Continually commoditising technology requires a strategy for partnering with vendors and competitors so that the group increases technology sharing as it becomes less of a competitive differentiator."
SOA, as part of an organisation`s execution infrastructure, should create new services at the edge. The key to competitive advantage is having a commodity core and a unique edge - the inverse is a recipe for disaster, said Appel.
He urged organisations to incorporate SOA in their enterprise architecture as more that just the arbitrary use of Web services, by thinking "differently" about SOA. Organisations should think about SOA in terms of network, modularity and the cycle of unique innovation excellence of commodity execution from edge to core, said Appel.
"Focus relentlessly on unifying interoperability and 'evolvability`, and form a community of practice composed of all the stakeholders dealing with metadata, modelling and configuring to share insights across disciplinary jargon."
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