| Title: |
SOA Strategy for Enterprise Applications |
| Author: |
David Sprott |
| Publication Date: |
26 September 2006 |
| Report Type: |
Journal |
| Report Class: |
Best Practice |
| Abstract: |
Many enterprise applications are gradually transitioning to SOA. What should enterprise application users be doing in response? Is it sensible to view this as the easy route to SOA, and to simply adopt the SOA enabled applications? Or is there more to consider? In this report we advise on the importance of remaining, or more realistically for many enterprises, regaining control over critical aspects of application architecture. |
| Backgrounder: |
Most very large enterprises have a love hate relationship with their enterprise applications. Many are effectively locked into the applications and accept that the application is the major influence on their business processes. Other enterprises have attempted to customize their enterprise applications to support their specific business complexity – and it is not unusual to see major corporations running many instances of an enterprise application in an endeavor to support the real business requirements. The outcome for many organizations is a very high level of complexity and even dependency on specific versions.
Many enterprise application vendors are starting to transition to SOA and there is a wide range of achievement, spanning simple web service enablement of integration to domain service based architectures supporting sophisticated business process design and orchestration. The dominant vendors in the enterprise applications space are of course SAP and Oracle. Following (Oracle’s) rampant acquisition spree it seems that, in the general commercial marketplace anyway, there is little choice outside the two gorillas. Microsoft is still working on Project Green, and we must assume this will reemerge at some time for the SME market, and while it may well be a long term winner, it is unlikely to figure in major enterprise strategies any time soon.
The vendors are of course eager to jump on the SOA bandwagon and make many claims of the benefits of moving to their new architecture. But the important question for users is “who’s controlling your architecture?” Whilst an organization may in the past have been prepared to effectively outsource entire application areas including architecture to third parties, many will assess the results as mixed. More than a few will accept the situation as somewhere between sub-optimal to disastrous. |
| Report Size: |
6 pages |
| Report Access Type: |
 | Silver/Gold (Premium) |
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| Available for separate purchase |
Single copies of recent CBDI Journals may be purchased |
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