The Dark Side of SOA

It's the little-discussed dark side of the promising market for service-oriented architectures. "No one's trying to go out and screw this up--everyone's trying to do it right," Hamer says. But "until this year, I haven't heard a businessperson use the term 'SOA.'"

When it comes to Web services, striking the right balance between what business units need and what IT departments deliver is difficult. According to an InformationWeek Research Web survey of 273 business-tech pros last month, 24% of respondents using SOA and Web services say the projects fell short of expectations. Of those, 55% say SOA projects introduced more complexity into their IT environments, and 41% say they cost more than expected. Out of all respondents using SOAs and Web services, just 7% say the results exceeded expectations.

"Where I've seen great technology projects fail is when business doesn't see it as important," says Terri Schoenrock, Hewlett-Packard's executive director of SOA. More than a quarter of SOA projects she's seen have fallen short of expectations. "And it's usually about business and IT alignment problems."

The Right Tools

As Web services projects move out of pilots and small departmental efforts, making them work is becoming more important. Managing Web services and making sure they meet cost, business process, and integration goals is challenging enough with early-stage projects that consist of a few dozen software components. As companies' code bases reach hundreds or thousands of components slated for reuse, and Web services extend beyond company walls, having the right tools to manage them is critical. Technology companies, including BEA Systems, HP, and IBM, are trying to met the need here, making acquisitions intended to shore up their software products with technology that can produce and enforce hard and fast rules about which services have access to which data and business logic. The hope is that assembling data repositories filled with software components and rules that govern their use will encourage adoption. Vendors also are encouraging customers to pay more attention to cultural aspects of SOA projects, such as getting business managers to set clear objectives for return on investment.

IBM last month said it would buy privately held Webify Solutions, which has a catalog of software components that can help companies standardize processes such as insurance claims processing, order placing, and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Webify, which has operations in Austin, Texas, and Mumbai, India, helps insurance and health care companies use Web services to share data among computer systems. IBM also plans to use Webify's library of Web services in a new SOA software development unit in Bangalore, India.

HP in July said it would buy Mercury Interactive, a software company whose products help companies manage software development projects, for $4.5 billion. Mercury in January had bought Systinet, a maker of registry and repository software for Web services. BEA Systems last month bought software company Flashline, which makes a metadata repository that will become part of BEA's AcquaLogic line of products. And webMethods acquired nearly all the assets of Cerebra, including its metadata repository, and plans to incorporate the technology into a future release.

More Than Links

Just a few years ago, Web services were used mainly for integrating computer systems based on technologies from different IT vendors. That's still the case, to an extent: 84% of survey respondents say they use service-oriented architectures to integrate Windows systems, and more than half say they use the technology to link systems that run Unix.

But interest is growing fastest in using SOA technology to adhere to industry standards for how business processes are completed in the face of increased and changing regulations. People don't do SOA because it provides better app integration, says Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at consulting company ZapThink. "SOA is about continuous change."

And the market for SOA is growing quickly: WinterGreen Research predicts it will grow from $630 million this year to $18.4 billion by 2012. Some 64% of companies using SOA expect their spending on it to increase this year compared with last, according to the InformationWeek survey. HP's Schoenrock says SOA projects carry an average price tag of $300,000 to $2 million. Yet more than half of companies using SOA say they aren't measuring the ROI on their projects.

To be sure, service-oriented architectures are complicated. Web services try to link data from complex computer systems, and there are few prepackaged products--implementing an SOA is mostly a custom job. It's not unusual early in an adoption cycle for new technology to be more complicated and expensive than expected. In the case of SOA, the IT industry is still relatively early in its migration to standardized, reusable software services.

Slow And Steady

Still, nearly half (45%) of survey respondents rate SOA projects as very important to their companies' business goals. The most common reasons for adopting the technology include standardization, automating business processes, cutting operating costs, and increasing customer satisfaction. Among companies using SOA, 72% say they hope to achieve increased application development flexibility, 61% list the ability to more quickly create apps that use Web services as important, and 58% say they want more modular software. But just 26% of respondents say they're pursuing SOA very aggressively. Companies that aren't using the technology cite the absence of IT goals for it and a lack of in-house expertise.

Problems with SOA projects aren't just related to technology. Good management and governance of the projects is also a top concern. Primitive Logic CTO Pete Conner says failed projects often result from lack of strong governance over IT and business objectives, including clearly defined stakeholders and architectural standards. At companies whose SOA projects fall short of expectations, "I would bet some major money they didn't sit down at the table and look at the business side," he says.

Michael Liebow, IBM's VP of Web services and SOA, says companies with savvy executive teams tend to be most effective at governing SOA projects and recommends that customers define their projects' starting points, the state they hope to arrive at, funding levels, who's in charge and who's not, metrics for success, and who gets access to the software that's created.

They're the companies that understand the benefits the complex and challenging technology can offer: faster and more efficient application development, better delivery of services, improved integration and communications with business partners, and, of course, lower costs. They also understand that a new way of developing software with relatively immature tools can take more time than expected and produce disappointing results. Yet, their spending plans make one thing very clear: Despite some initial problems, SOA is here to stay and will play an increasingly important role in the way businesses develop and deploy software and services.