SOA Building Blocks

The incremental approach of SOA design is an attractive selling point. Summit's McCubbins likes to start by zeroing in on one process: "It may not be the most critical, but it will be one where we can have a quick win."

For one of its co-op clients, Summit began by modeling the workflow involved in creating an IT entry for a new customer's electrical meter. Establishing a new meter used to be a manual process that dragged on for weeks, but the system Summit designed allows it to happen almost instantaneously. That proof point sold the customer on the benefits of investing in a broader SOA overhaul.

Systems integrators have long wrestled with the challenges of heterogeneous IT environments, and the core ideas driving SOA—about the value of flexible, integrated systems—aren't new. What's changed, according to solution providers, is that software, standards and best-practices methodologies have come of age. Companies now can rely on the infrastructure of the Internet to physically link remote data systems, while standards like XML, SOAP and WSDL are ubiquitous.

"What the Web services standards and the tools built around them have done for us is alleviate the technical roadblocks for integration, so you can spend more time on the business issues," said Paul Hernacki, CTO of Definition 6 in Atlanta.

Global solutions provider Keane had 40 consultants trained for SOA projects four years ago. Today, it has 300. Financial services and pharmaceutical companies have been among the most rapid adopters, said Alkesh Shah, Keane's director of system architecture.

Of course, a fledgling and rapidly evolving field has its share of speed bumps. Critical specifications like XML are entrenched, but vendors continue wrangling over others, jockeying for advantage. A much-hyped protocol for an online, programmatic registry of business services, UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), essentially collapsed last year amid lackluster adoption and a decision by its backers to pull off in different directions with their implementations. In such a dynamic field, figuring out which horses to back is a delicate art.

Meanwhile, the market for SOA-enabling software is filled with pure-play vendors facing intense competition from giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, which are fleshing out their own SOA middleware offerings. Even solution providers that sometimes recommend the indie vendors don't foresee them sticking around because the expectation is that they'll get bought or fade away. Keane's Shah remembers a client project in which he evaluated XML processing technology from IBM and DataPower, a smaller rival. Shah recommended DataPower—only to see the company swallowed up by IBM a year later.

"What would compel somebody to select one of [the pure plays] when the big guys are adding features and acquiring companies constantly?" asked ZapThink analyst Schmelzer. "Companies just don't like risk, so they're first and foremost going to their existing technology providers."

The SOA technology field is also strewn with open-source offerings. For ESBs, companies can pick among Mule, ServiceMix, JBoss ESB and others. Open-source software can be useful for inexpensive proof-of-concepts, Shah said.

"If a client doesn't want to invest in any given way of implementing a stack, they go with open source and it doesn't cost them a dime," he said. "Once they understand the value of that way of doing the SOA implementation, they may want to reduce risk and swap out the open source for a more reliable vendor."

Years after the SOA buzz began, it's still building—but so are the benefits of broadening adoption.

"SOA is an architectural pattern that I think still has legs for the next five years," said Tim Marshall of Neudesic. "Reality is setting in. SOA doesn't cure cancer, it's not going to solve world hunger. It's another tool in our tool belt, and it's definitely one with momentum."