| Title: |
Directions and Diversions |
| Author: |
David Sprott |
| Publication Date: |
20 December 2005 |
| Report Type: |
Journal |
| Report Class: |
Market Analysis |
| Abstract: |
As we rapidly approach the end of 2005 it’s a good time to take stock and consider where the world is heading in 2006 and beyond. We look past the infrastructural issues to the next major phase of activity as the industry moves to commoditize and deliver application and content services.
You would be forgiven for thinking that 2006 has been the year of SOA. It’s been hard to avoid. The vendors have certainly been putting their money into the SOA marketing bucket, yet there’s few organizations that will say they are fully mature in their use of SOA. So what is going on?
|
| Backgrounder: |
In this relatively early stage of adoption enterprises have not modified their funding and budgeting practices and are simply adopting SOA as an extension to regular project activity. We have seen many examples of duplicated project specific infrastructure, data and service models. There is little thinking about policy yet. While this approach will bring some benefits – of better project structure and maintainability, it is unlikely to evolve to more widely shared services. We again make the analogy that you don’t evolve a city plan from block level to precinct to the entire city.
Consequently this year has been a period in which many enterprises have been adopting SOA technologies and architecture in a predominantly ad hoc fashion. While there are organizations that are taking a strategic enterprise view, most have been in an early learning phase.
What’s rather strange is that most of the vendors promoting SOA have been encouraging this project based approach. In our article this month on SOA Maturity Models, we report on a worrying trend by significant vendors who are advising their customers to delay thinking about enterprise level SOA. We conclude that the vendors find it too hard to change their customers’ buying behaviors and are taking the line of least resistance by aligning with existing organizational practices. The fact that this potentially compromises investments is unfortunate.
Not surprisingly this commercial behavior reflects what the vendors have to sell. As shown in Figure 1, SOA platform and tool capabilities are going to take some considerable time to mature. Right now vendors have infrastructure and tools to sell. So rather then be good citizens and advise enterprises to establish a common shared infrastructure ( I think that’s a fundamental part of an SOA) they are perfectly happy to sell the same product to all the customer’s projects.
This situation will change in 2006/7. The platforms and tools will gradually mature. Larger vendors will see strategic sales as being more and more important and will have the integrated platforms to deliver on the broader SOA vision. |
| Report Size: |
6 pages |
| Report Access Type: |
 | Silver/Gold (Premium) |
|
| Available for separate purchase |
Single copies of recent CBDI Journals may be purchased |
| Login |
|
Home