SOA will be used in more than 50 percent of new mission-critical operational applications and business processes designed in 2007 and in more than 80 percent by 2010, according to Gartner.

Click here to view "Missing Links in SOA Projects" SYS-CON.TV webinar

SOA has dramatically grown in popularity, and adoption has expanded across vertical industries, geographies and organization sizes. However, the number of failed projects has also grown, organizations have discovered that SOA benefits have a cost and the challenges associated with its adoption have become more apparent.

“New software products for SOA have hit the market, but given their immaturity, have disappointed users in terms of reliability, performance and productivity,” said L. Frank Kenney, research director for Gartner. “SOA principles have been applied too rigidly, and this has led to unsatisfactory outcomes as projects became too costly and didn’t meet deadlines.

However, Mr. Kenney pointed out that this is not bad news. Organizations are indeed utilizing this approach and adopting the relevant enabling technologies. “Large numbers of successes have been reported, and no major conceptual flaw has been discovered in SOA. Organizations should aggressively invest in SOA as it will rapidly become the architectural foundation for virtually every new business-critical application,” Mr. Kenney said.

Moving to an SOA is, in most cases, motivated by significant changes in the business environment. This need most frequently manifests itself in the context of a specific business unit, but often also at the corporate level.

“SOA adoption is greatly beneficial from the CIO’s point of view. To keep pace with relentless business change, IT departments are constantly under pressure to deliver more in a flat-budget situation,” said Mr. Kenney. “SOA can frequently be part of the answer by providing a sound architectural framework to help CIOs address their challenges. However, SOA is not a product they can buy and install. In additional to adoption of new technologies, it requires changes in people’s behavior. Organizations looking to strategically adopt SOA should develop their business case on a combination of anticipated business and IT benefits.”

The practical benefits of a well-implemented SOA are greater adaptability, faster time to deployment and lower costs for application development and integration. But SOA adoption also has significant implications. Compared with traditional monolithic or client/server architectures, SOA needs a more-careful application design. It often requires use of integration middleware. Testing, debugging, managing and securing a distributed SOA are complex and expensive.

Addressing these issues is of paramount importance for successful SOA initiatives. However, despite the falling cost of technology, more widespread know-how and availability of SOA services from systems integrators, the incremental upfront cost of SOA vs. a traditional architecture in most cases can’t be justified for fast return-on-investment, opportunistically oriented projects. Gartner says that through 2008, the upfront investment for large-scale service-oriented applications will be justifiable only for projects with a planned lifetime of three years or more.

SYS-CON.TV SOA Webcast Features Gartner's Roy Schulte
Roy Schulte, VP at Gartner and its research team leader for Application Integration and Middleware, discusses trends and practices for SOA in this brand-new webinar presented by MetaMatrix.

In particular, Schulte underlines the important role being played by Data Services.

Hosted by SYS-CON.TV, the webinar features not only the industry-respected Schulte but also Sean Rhody, the editor-in-chief of SYS-CON Media's SOA World Magazine, and Craig Muzilla, SVP Marketing and Product Management for MetaMatrix, leading provider of data service management systems.