Are SOAs Ready For Prime Time?

Technology's history is full of great ideas that never quite caught on. IBM is ramping up its efforts with vendor and channel partners to ensure the concept of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) doesn't become one of them.

Last month, the company held a Q&A panel session in San Francisco outlining the latest developments in its SOA efforts. The event, which coincided with an IBM customer conference, gave the media a chance to grill Steve Mills, IBM's software group senior vice president, and Michael Liebow, vice president of Web services for IBM's Global Services Division, as well as executives from a few other companies.

As part of the session, Big Blue announced a partnership with Lawson Software to optimize and standardize Lawson's business-applications portfolio on IBM's open-standards-based software and hardware. The companies also will jointly market preintegrated solutions to customers, and develop and market vertical offerings for a variety of industries, including health care, retail and government.

Mills expressed confidence that the latest developments would help SOAs become a more attractive option for organizations seeking to streamline their networks. "Companies have always wanted to integrate their business processes, but that has frequently been a problem," he says.

One of IBM's customers is insurance provider Fireman's Fund. CIO Fred Matteson says the company has begun deploying SOAs because its old way of processing forms was inefficient, and the company also wanted to architect its networks to be more flexible as it adds or subtracts personnel. "We needed to change our development model from fixed costs to variable costs...and to do that, we needed an IT infrastructure to support it," he says.

But despite the promise of SOAs and the gains they've made in certain sectors, only a small number of potential clients have actively adopted the technologies.

"The missing ingredient is packaged applications," says Dean Hager, chief product officer at Lawson Software. "When they're architected specifically for SOAs, that's when you'll start to see greater adoption."

One suggestion the panelists had for anyone trying to sell SOAs is to focus on the less business-critical applications first. "By taking a very simple first step, we could easily make the SOA format available without taking a lot of business risks," Matteson says.

Lawson Software is staking its claim to the SOA space with its Landmark platform, also announced in May. Landmark aims to mitigate the amount of computer code that has encumbered business software. Lawson is pitching Landmark as a model that dramatically reduces the source coding required, resulting in virtually error-free, consistent Java code.

"We're going to the midmarket with it," Hager says. "The value proposition is its price--which is about one-third of Oracle's and one-fourth of SAP's. The midmarket won't embrace it at the program level; only after it becomes a product will they get interested."