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Will SOA Become The New Siloed App?


By Jennifer deJong
April 15, 2007 — 
Siloed applications were supposed to be a thing of the past. But the very technology intended to replace separate business systems that don’t work together may well be creating new silos of its own.

“SOA is silo-based,” said Ryan Berg, co-founder and chief scientist for application security tool maker Ounce Labs. So far, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been adopted on largely a departmental basis, creating departmental SOAs that function much the same way application silos do, he said.

Standing in the way of broader, enterprisewide SOA adoption are some technology issues, such as the relative immaturity of some Web services standards, noted Berg. But the bigger roadblock that keeps SOA from moving beyond department-level projects are the cultural and turf issues that come up when a company decides to replace traditional applications with a set of business services that can be coupled and decoupled to carry out multiple different business processes, said research analysts and SOA consultants.

SOA projects have been implemented largely on a departmental basis because that approach is workable, said analyst Rob Enderle, who runs The Enderle Group. “But when you move away from a hierarchical structure, where one manager dictates, to a situation where two [or more groups] are brought together, SOA is vastly more difficult.”

Challenges that arise range from getting buy-in from team members who have built their careers around developing and maintaining individual business applications, to determining who pays for a service, and who maintains, updates and tests it, the analysts and consultants said. Learning to effectively manage shared services among many parties requires “time and gentle persuasion,” said TIBCO Software senior vice president of product strategy Matt Quinn.

Companies are left to their own devices to figure out how best to do that, added WebMethods general manager for SOA solutions Lance Hill. And that rarely results in success, he said. “To make [SOA] work, you need senior-level commitment, and commitment at every level. And most companies don’t have that.”

Both TIBCO and WebMethods provide SOA consulting services, among other offerings.

ONE PROCESS AT A TIME
Departmental adoption, though it hinders SOA’s broader reach, is the most practical way to get started, said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. “If you tried to do SOA for all of a company’s business processes [simultaneously], it’s a disaster.” So most companies take on SOA one small business process at a time, said Sandy Carter, IBM vice president of marketing and strategy for SOA, noting that only

5 percent of the company’s SOA consulting engagements are enterprise projects. Smaller projects typically get under way because “something is broken” in the business environment, she said. A manufacturer, for example, might find itself unable to keep pace with the financing incentives its competitors offer. So it implements a SOA to speed up the loan management process for a particular marketing program, such as “Buy now; pay no interest for 30 days,” she said.

The key, said the consultants and analysts, is not to allow small SOA silos to proliferate without paying attention to the larger whole.

To reap SOA’s promised benefits of service reuse, companies cannot simply implement many small projects. They must figure out how to share services among multiple different business processes. That usually calls for consolidation, where attention to the big picture is crucial, said Carter. “A large company may have as many as a thousand different ways to carry out a single function, such as creating a new customer account.”

Managers heading SOA efforts must look at the various ways different business applications accomplish that task, and decide which one to encapsulate as a service, she said. “You have to determine which [functions] represent best practices, and maybe borrow best practices from the industry.”

That’s a tall order for those leading large-scale SOA efforts. Big companies have built vast teams of people to develop and maintain line-of-business applications, said TIBCO’s Quinn. SOA not only reconfigures those teams, it may also make some of the members expendable. “If a SOA strategy reduces the number of people a manager needs, he is going to find something wrong with it,” he said. Managers in that situation can wield a lot of power, because every company has a vested interest in keeping its business applications operating smoothly, added Quinn. “The people around business apps have to feel there is something in SOA for them, too.”

TOO MUCH ON DEVELOPERS
Sometimes that’s a matter of coming up with new ways to incent developers, said Carter. “Traditionally they have been rewarded by creating new code. But SOA is about reuse.” That may mean offering incentives to re-use services, she said.

For the time being, it appears there is still plenty of code for developers to write. “Right now, too much is put on the developers,” and that is hindering broader SOA adoption, said Ounce Labs’ Berg. Developers are being asked to write code to implement functions that should be carried out in the framework, he said. While baseline SOA standards such

as XML and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) are well established and fully implemented in the tools, others such as WS-Policy (for managing rules associated with using a Web service) are not, added Quinn. That impacts developers in terms of how much work is expected of them, he said. “They should be focused on business logic. But instead they are focused on [writing code to implement] the infrastructure.”

Forrester analyst Randy Heffner agreed SOA standards need to mature, particularly those that help companies govern how services are managed. One aspect of governance that is missing today, he said, is the ability to place an individual service in a larger portfolio of services before that service has actually been developed. “You can’t build all of your services at once,” he said, “but determining from the get-go what the larger service portfolio will include is critical, he said.

Heffner said that while many are quick to point out how few businesses have made wholesale commitments to SOA, actual adoption rates fall in the range he expected.

“We are making progress,” he said. In a survey conducted by Forrester in late 2005, 53 percent of the companies surveyed said they were using, or planning to use, SOA. Of those, 18 percent said they had an enterprise-level commitment and strategy for SOA. Those numbers rose in 2006—62 percent said they were using, or planning to use, SOA. And 22 percent said they had an enterprise-level commitment and strategy for SOA.

The real measure of SOA’s success will occur when the term itself becomes irrelevant, said TIBCO’s Quinn. “In 1997 and 1998, the big thing was e-business. No one talks about e-business today. And yet everything people are doing in IT is related to e-business.” SOA is headed in that same direction. “All projects will be SOA projects, and the concept of SOA will permeate every aspect of IT,” he said. “But we won’t necessarily call it SOA.”


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