The SOA Revolution Evolution

Last week saw the formation of The SOA Consortium, a group dedicated to the idea that service-oriented architecture adoption is a key enabler of the 21st-century enterprise. Its founding members include vendors BEA Systems, Cisco, IBM and SAP AG.

End-user companies, such as Avis Budget Car Rental and Bank of America, as well as HP, Webex Communications, and the Integration Consortium, are on board as participants in the organization. The goal of the Consortium, which is managed by the Object Management Group, is to help Global 1000 companies succcessfully adopt service-oriented architectures.

Though not a founding member or participant in The SOA Consortium, that’s the same goal infrastructure vendor Tibco says it is pursuing. At the Merrill Lynch Internet, Software & Services conference last week, Tibco executive VP Ram Menon saidt its focus this year is going to be on getting early adopters of its new ActiveMatrix service virtualization platform up and running well.

“I personally and others have been intensely involved in making customers successful,” he noted.

The industry acknowledges that moving to SOA will require significant changes for both IT and business executives. Going SOA is a multi-year commitment, rather than the flavor of the moment, Menon said, and it’s influencing customers’ spending in everything from security to development to business intelligence, with development and deployment—Tibco’s sweet spot—consuming the largest chunk right now.

“As people deploy SOA, the biggest issue is complexity,” said Menon. “The second issue is that it’s a heterogeneous world.”

Companies moving to SOA architectures will be disaggregating applications from their silos—whether built on .Net, J2EE, or other platforms—and connecting them together to deploy them as services.

“The reality of current enterprise infrastructure is that everything has to work together. We’ve been focused on those two issues and solving those two basic problems.”

From Smaller to Bigger Projects

The evolution to SOA environments is accelerating, Menon told attendees. “We have been talking about SOA for 18 months and we’re seeing people moving aggressively forward.”

Nine months ago, Tibco’s internal research showed that 25% of companies had SOA projects in the pipeline. Now its research shows that about 70% of people have SOA projects that need to be complete in the next 12 months. “So there is a kind of surge going on,” he says.

There’s no reason to point to for the uptick, though. “The trigger point is change in terms of the recognition they need to go this way, and using small projects to make things happen, then moving to bigger projects,” he said.

Evolution — not revolution — is the key word here, though. According to IT advisory firm Saugatuck Technology, SOA is experiencing slow but steady adoption among large and mid-sized enterprises, but it is still very early in the deployment cycle across all enterprises.

Online auto site Cars.com is rearchitecting its web site to support an aggressive product roadmap [refer to http://www.bitaplanet.com/alignment/article.php/3657071], and is leveraging web services as part of the solution, but it isn’t wholesale committed to SOA yet.

“We will investigate the viability of SOA going forward,” says CTO Manny Montejano. “But given our tactical and strategic business plans, we’re going to do a crawl-walk-run scenario and try to mitigate as much risk from a technology perspective, while allowing the business to remain agile. So we will extend services throughout the architecture and it’s our hope that SOA promises are actually delivered by the industry.”

Tibco says it’s not just its technology that will outshine some of the bigger ERP companies that have been steadily moving into its space, such as Oracle and SAP.

“This is the hottest market left in the enterprise software market,” Menon said. “Sure the big guys are going to come in and say they have everything. But we’ve done this for a long time.”

But no less important, he said, is that today’s CIO is less likely to buy into their major ERP vendor’s SOA story for perceived efficiencies.

“There’s a new breed of CIOs who are not wedded to the past,” Menon said. “They want to see things happen...and they come to you with not a lot of baggage.”