SOA Survey Indicates Success
Enterprises are integrating legacy applications
January 31, 2008 —
Survey says: most organizations are implementing SOA to solve integration issues across heterogeneous environments, and they have been successful in adopting it within their enterprise.
AmberPoint, a company that produces governance solutions for service-oriented architectures (SOA), surveyed 330 IT professionals from a convenience sample, one without statistical significance, of its customers and contacts; about half were AmberPoint customers. The respondents included software architects, development managers and directors of operations.
The survey found that a majority, or 58 percent, of SOA systems contain components that are not designed to be interoperable as Web services. These include components that use non-SOAP messaging, such as IBM WebSphere MQ and Java’s Remote Method Invocation. Further, mainframe applications show up in 47 percent of SOA applications, and packaged applications accounted for 68 percent of components.
“The journey toward a SOA environment is just that, a journey over time,” remarked Ed Horst, AmberPoint’s vice president of product strategy. “The vast majority of new components are not SOA- [or] SOAP-enabled components, but companies are usually adding a new piece that is SOAP-enabled.”
According to the findings, SOA-based systems span organizations and relatively few were standalone, single-department systems. Of SOA production systems, 53 percent serve multiple departments and 26 percent are deployed externally to customers and partners.
Despite its promise of reusable, loosely coupled services, SOA is most commonly adopted to address integration issues. A majority of respondents identified inflexibility and “stovepipe,” or ad hoc architectures, as the primary problems that SOA addresses. Results for this item were consistent among customers and non-customers.
“Re-use isn’t the predominant benefit customers are looking at,” said Horst. He added that a handful of SOA environments (6 percent) incorporated more than 250 different components.
Perhaps most intriguing was the result indicating that more than 90 percent of respondents characterized their SOA projects as being a full or partial success. Only 1.5 percent met with failure.
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