NetManage announced results from a Service-oriented architecture (SOA) legacy application modernization study. The study, which was based on an analysis of derivative data from Aberdeen Research's "Legacy Application Modernization Benchmark Report," found that 53 percent of respondents will address legacy modernization and cultural challenges by taking a systematic "incremental" approach to SOA modernization projects in order to ensure project success and meet ROI goals.

"An incremental approach to legacy modernizations will ease the pain for organizations that comes with adopting an SOA," said Peter Kastner, vice president and research director at Aberdeen Research. "Not only does an incremental SOA approach increase the likelihood that a project will meet objectives, we also found that it will diminish the cultural challenges developers have in using existing Web services to create new applications."

The survey also found that more than 50 percent of the respondents cite a "lack of skills and training" in SOA while 47 percent cite "unknown value for ROI and return on assets" as barriers to wider adoption. These findings suggest that for many organizations, an incremental approach will ease the pain that comes with conducting legacy application modernization efforts while making it easier for developers and business analysts to "buy-in" and learn how to successfully bring SOA and Web services to their organizations that meet IT and financial goals.

"Aberdeen Research's findings are consistent with what we are hearing from our successful Global 1000 customers who have conducted SOA legacy implementations," said Zvi Alon, chairman, president and CEO of NetManage. "Most implementations that come in over budget or fail to meet results do so because they are poorly planned, have very ambitious goals, or fail to get developer buy-in at the beginning of the project. Organizations who follow our 'Incremental SOA' approach and use our SOA Planner and OnWeb products should expect to meet objectives and goals faster than those who take a 'organization-wide roll-out' path to their efforts."

NetManage's Incremental SOA approach to legacy application modernization is based on the company's many years of integrating, Web enabling and accessing enterprise information systems for more than 10,000 customers, including the majority of the Fortune 500. Central to the Incremental SOA approach are the company's SOA Planner, OnWeb and OnWeb for CICS technologies that help organizations plan, build, evolve and scale deployments incrementally as the best way to optimize modernization efforts while meeting ROI goals.

• Legacy Modernization