Will SOA Become The New Siloed App?
By Jennifer deJong
April 15, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 4)
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.”
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