Nov 30 2009
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/7cccdc/soa_adoption_trac) has announced the addition of the "SOA Adoption: Tracking the Use, Maturity, and Best Practices of SOA" report to their offering.
There is now considerable experience in deploying solutions based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Most, but not all, of those experiences have been positive ones. Regardless of the perceived success many lessons have been learned that have refined our expectations of SOA and increased the prospects of success for later adopters.
This Report re-examines many of the principles and assumptions surrounding SOA to give an up-to-date appraisal of issues around the business, the platform, governance, and design. It includes recent survey results that show how maturity has progressed and also indicates the lack of balance between domains that is still encountered too often. A set of case studies reveals how individual organisations have deployed SOA to meet specific requirements, and describes the lessons they have learned from which others can benefit.
The purpose of SOA is to provide a long-lived catalogue of services that deliver functionality of recognised value to the business. The services must be capable of being used (or 'consumed') in any valid context irrespective of differences in technology, and they must be capable of evolving as requirements change with the minimum possible impact on consumers or other services. The architectural principles around SOA have been designed to support these long-term benefits, and the supporting technology has been designed to provide the autonomy and abstraction that is needed by a long period of agile business change. However, the architectural principles and the technology have to be implemented and managed correctly, otherwise the potential benefits could be lost and SOA become just another layer of middleware that has to be supported.
Conclusions
- The experiences detailed in this Report show that there is no 'one size fits all' approach to SOA adoption.
- It can be part of a successful strategy for small organisations or large enterprises, and private or public sector alike, provided that a realistic assessment is made of the desire of the business to embrace change, the capabilities of the organisation, and the level of investment that will be required.
- Adopting SOA means a significant change to the way that most IT operations work. In particular it requires the ability to work collaboratively with the business in delivering limited-scope, incremental projects, while progressing towards the target of delivering business services through IT. SOA cannot (or should not) be considered as a stand-alone initiative, but should be considered as complementary to other business-visible initiatives that together have the capability of transforming the business world as much as the IT world.
This Report reveals:
- Why business/IT collaboration is important from the start of the SOA deployment.
- Why organisations must resist shortcutting the architectural design effort.
- How to phase-in SOA governance to keep the cost proportional to the risks.
- How the economic climate impacts the expectations of SOA.
- How SOA mutually supports and exploits other IT and business innovations.
- Why SOA is now approachable by small as well as large enterprises.
- What types of deployment platform are viable alternatives to the Enterprise Service Bus.
- How open source technology has become a viable alternative to traditionally-licensed SOA products.
Source: http://www.researchandmarkets.com/