<<SOA adoption is a little like love and marriage, suggests Peter S.
Kastner, vice president of enterprise integration for the Aberdeen
Group. It starts out with the glow of romance and ends up with a
reality that while it is far from perfect, it doesn't mean it can't be
made to work.
As the lead for Aberdeen's fact-based research on SOA, the analyst
looks at data he has gathered from a thousand-plus companies and
concludes that if 2005 was the year of SOA romance, by the end of
2006, the honeymoon is over. The promise of SOA cost-savings remains
its biggest lure, he said, looking over the research he has gathered
during six trips out into the field where he visited IT professionals
who are actually trying to make SOA work.
"The cost of integrating applications is roughly 40 percent the IT
budget," Kastner said. "That's 40 percent of $1.3 trillion global IT
budget. It's just an enormous factor in overall costs."
Millions of lines of COBOL code are becoming more and more expensive
to maintain, he said, adding that in many corporations, "COBOL has
reached the breaking point and beyond."
One popular answer is composite applications.
"The answer plain and simple is that if I can keep the business logic
of how to do the transactions, how to do the database in my existing
legacy code, and then with SOA and Web services turn it into a
composite, I can extend the life of that application indefinitely," he
said. "I can clean up the front end with a variety of new Web
development tools. For example, I get rid of all of the user
inefficiencies of having to deal with multiple green screens and give
people the rich Windows user interface that they are used to and can
get a lot more information per square inch of screen real estate."
Composite applications sound good, but Kastner says that approach is
basically "putting lipstick on the SOA pig." It doesn't deliver on the
full-promise of SOA, but for many IT department that are just
beginning to work with Web services applications, it may be their most
doable option.
He notes that most of the IT departments he's visited are in the first
year to six months of trying to work with the new technology. In many
cases, they do not yet have the skills and knowledge to build a
complete SOA infrastructure, but he found some that have made
meaningful progress. While it is difficult and will take years, a big
payoff looms for those who put in the effort. Kastner found some
leadership in the banking industry.
"They are buying not only into the lipstick approach of putting a
pretty face on an old tired application with Web services," he said,
"but they're also moving toward a much more controlled, governed and
smaller code base by populating a services-oriented architecture."
He said one new York banking institution, which demanded anonymity
before taking part in his research, is in the midst of a major project
that involves replacing 1,500 individual applications, representing
literally billions of lines of code.
"When they get done a year or two from now, they will end up with 200
services and an order of magnitude less code," Kastner explained.
"They should see dramatically decreased software maintenance costs and
hence lower application development lifecycle costs. That is a huge
driver for companies.">>
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