SOA – Prepared by Nisha Koshi What is SOA all about?
Service orientation is an approach to organizing distributed IT resources into an integrated solution. The key is in creating loosely coupled business services that are essentially free from the underlying IT infrastructure. Key characteristics of SOA are: • All software resources in a SOA are positioned as services • All services on a SOA can communicate with each other and these services are linked to business processes • Services on a SOA are autonomous, vendor diverse, interoperable, discoverable and reusable. Key Benefits of SOA implementation • It enables enterprises to directly link technology with business results. • As SOA creates a flexible IT architecture, it enables an enterprise to adapt to changing business dynamics with speed and agility. • SOA lowers IT expenditures as it helps organizations meet new business needs with existing resources.
SOA spending and resultant cost saving
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In a recent survey by IBM, overall IT spending on SOA was estimated between 10 - 30% by 40% of the respondents. About 53% of the respondents said that their 2007 SOA budgets had risen between 10-20% compared with last year
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According to Aberdeen report, a $10 billion company with a $300 million IT budget can save $30 million per year from a broad SOA adoption after a 5-year horizon of implementing SOA in at least 75% of its applications.
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It further predicts that over the next five years, the top Global 2000 organizations have a potential to save $53 billion from their IT budgets as a result of SOA bearing fruit in reducing software implementation costs.
Key Business Drivers to SOA Adoption
SOA Global Prospects
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Service oriented architecture (SOA) markets which were at $187 million in 2004 are expected to reach $17.7 billion by 2011.
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Frost and Sullivan’s report that SOA adoption is expected to increase by 40% in the next two years as all major software vendors are altering and creating software to suit the needs of an SOA framework.
APAC Region • Springboard Research expects the market to grow at a CAGR of 38% to reach US $1.2 billion by 2009. In that time, SOA integration and consultancy services will form the bulk of the SOA opportunity in Asia Pacific with around 60% share. India • SOA market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 49% from 2006-2009, making it the fastest growing market in the region. • IBM leads the SOA marketplace among Indian enterprises in terms of actual implementations. • In terms of brand perception and preferred brands among SOA planners, Oracle, BEA and Tibco emerge as other important brands in the country. • IT service providers like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Ramco Systems, Satyam, HCL Technologies, Polaris Software, Cognizant Technologies, and Patni Computers besides a host of other small and mid size firms are building SOA capabilities. Singapore Singapore was amongst the earliest to realize the benefits of SOA. To support and accelerate the adoption of SOA in Singapore, Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) and Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) to set up the SiTF-NYP SOA Centre. This vendor neutral Centre is a first in the region and it aims to provide Web Services Interoperability Testing for locally-based enterprises. UAE IT spending in the area of system integration was about 23.7% of the total in 2005. IDC’s report in 2005 had recommended that service providers should start considering SOA as central to the way they offer services and design infrastructure for their clients.
SOA Market Segmentation
Major Vendors Forrester Research report has clearly classified to sets of SOA Tool vendors. Types of SOA Tool Vendor SOA Management and Security IT centric, technical aspects like service level management, performance monitoring
Vendor name and Software Solution Offered Infravio SOA Registry and Governance Solutions Itellix
HP
SOA Software SOA, XML, and Web services management and security
Business Level SOA management Application integration and business level monitoring
IBM Service-Oriented Architecture Solutions Oracle SOA Suite TIBCO BusinessWorks & Service deployment Platform Actional (Sonic Software) SOA Management Software BEA WebLogic, AquaLogic Microsoft BizTalk, WCF AmberPoint
webMethods Fabric and ServiceNet
SAP NetWeaver
Software AG
Crossvision
Current Trends
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IBM is the market leader among SOA vendors as of now, and has taken many initiatives including opening specialized SOA development centers Convergence between SOA and Web 2.0 will reshape e-businesses. Amazon and eBay use SOA to architect their backend and web 2.0 enabled frontend to provide services to their clients and partners. Imagine if e-businesses can integrate services provided by the big guys (google map, youtube, flickr) to build added value to the customer at low IT cost but this can cause additional issues in terms of governance. SOA vendor list is shrinking with vendors realizing they need SOA related functionality o Mercury interactive acquiring Systinet, HP acquiring Mercury, Progress Software bought Actional, RedHat Inc bought Jboss, SOA Software Inc bought Blue Titan, BEA systems Inc bought Flashline and finally the acquisition of Infravio by webMethods Inc which was in turn bought by Software AG. o Amberpoint and Mindreef could be on Oracles’ wishlist this year while Parasoft and iTKo on HP’s.
My take? Few enterprises are buying SOA by name. Instead, business buyers are paying for solutions to business problems and more consulting firms than ever before are leveraging Service Orientation best practices to provide those solutions. However there is a dearth of IT personnel with the practical know-how about implementing SOA. There is a buzz that SOA might phase out the trend of companies going for new ERP applications. This is not to say that ERP framework would be replaced. According to AMR research, by 2010, the trend might be that companies would contract with lowcost Indian or Eastern European integrators to build custom composite apps that sit on top of their ERP backbone. SOA may not overcome ERP with one big swoop, but might result in forestalling or reducing ERP upgrades. Much of this work may go to lower-cost offshore development firms and integrators. The diametrically opposite view says that if you have a huge, robust ERP system, SOA become unnecessary. Who will be proven right? Time will say…………..
References http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=698 http://www.soamag.com/I2/1106-1.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture Aberdeen report – The SOA in IT benchmark report