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INDUSTRIES
September 09, 2008
Widespread SOA Adoption Remains Low
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as an enterprise IT trend in recent years based on a desire to reduce costs, complexity and duplicated effort when developing or integrating multiple applications that provide similar functionality. SOA achieves this by delivering common and re-usable application building blocks or “services” that can be customized to the needs of a particular line of business or functional area.
As Enterprise Communications providers have begun implementing more software-centric delivery approaches to replace traditional proprietary PBX (News - Alert) boxes, several vendors such as Siemens and Avaya have launched initiatives to enable specific features of their communication software to be accessible through SOA-based business applications — a capability frequently referred to as “Communication Enabled Business Process” or CEBP.
In an on-going partnership with research firm IntelliCom Analytics (News - Alert), our latest user survey examined business leader views of SOA adoption and value, both in the general IT environment and as an enabler of embedding voice applications features into core business applications.
Of the 827 individuals participating in the survey worldwide, 72% indicated that their companies have no current plans for using SOA in any aspect of their technology environment. Of those businesses that are currently using — or planning to use — SOA, the respondents were nearly evenly divided between those that intended to use it as an architectural enabler for CEBP (15%), and those that intended to use SOA solely in their general IT environment (13%).
Both the general adoption of SOA and its use as a CEBP enabler varied by size of business. Organizations with greater than 1,000 employees had the highest percentage of respondents indicating that they plan to use SOA in a CEBP context (25%). This finding was anticipated since SOA is most likely to be deployed in large enterprise environments with complex application requirements and multiple lines of business / functional departments. Not surprisingly, companies with fewer than 20 employees had the lowest planned utilization of SOA for CEBP (7%).
Perceptions of SOA also varied based on the functional role of the respondent. Those in IT and Telecom Management were the most bullish on the prospect of leveraging SOA for integrating communication capabilities with other applications in their environment, with 21% and 31% respectively indicating plans to do so. This contrasts with just 8% of End Users and 17% of LOB decision makers sharing a similar sentiment. These findings track with the general sense that SOA is still at an early phase of its lifecycle, with discussion of its merits largely restricted to IT organizations. Clearly, the manufacturers and internal IT proponents of SOA have their work cut out for them in persuading business leaders on the value of SOA — not only for CEBP, but in the overall IT environment as well.
Edited by Greg Galitzine
