<<As service-oriented architecture (SOA) becomes more mainstream, early majority customers will decide who leads the SOA market. Since they have different needs than SOA's early adopters, understanding and serving those needs will be the key to market leadership over the next three to five years. What the mainstream wants Ultimately, mainstream companies want business results—something that has been woefully hard to measure in most SOA projects to date. Today's most commonly cited SOA benefits leave most CFOs cold, and real money doesn't get invested until the CFO buys in. Mainstream companies want business results like increased sales, decreased operating costs, and earnings per share. SOA will have to lay claim to these financial benefits if it is to get serious investment in mainstream companies. Asking SOA to deliver business results may seem a bit unfair. How can an architectural approach to software impact the bottom line of a typical company? The answer is SOA can provide a measurable impact via deeper relationships with partners and faster response to business threats and opportunities. The vendors and service providers that connect the dots between SOA and business results the most convincingly will be the SOA leaders of the next three to five years. Getting to SOA Building an SOA within an enterprise is not easy. While many companies feel the benefits are worth the effort, the path forward is hazy. Beneath the underpinnings of SOA is a fairly simple technical idea, but implementing SOA within an enterprise, with all of its existing applications, infrastructure, and staff, is no simple matter. Consider the plight of a CIO of a typical largish company. She has more than 20 years worth of technology and several hundred applications under management. What should she do to transform their enterprise systems to an SOA? Buy an SOA tool and start rebuilding from scratch? For most CIOs, the answer is no. She instead has to transform systems gradually and show business value at each step. She has a list of business-driven projects that need to be delivered, so she looks to build the services and architecture one step at a time while still giving her business customers top priority. There are many providers eager to help companies transform their collection of applications into an agile SOA. SOA platform vendors have captured much of corporate investment to date because even early adopters need SOA tools in order to create an SOA. However, mainstream companies need more than tools. Our mainstream CIO needs more than what platform vendors can generally offer. She needs functioning application services, talent that can implement SOA principles, and an architecture that will support the future needs of her business while working with her current realities. 1. Getting to S An SOA relies on application services: the well-defined interfaces to chunks of application functionality that actually do something of business value. One of the fastest ways for our CIO to get those services is to take them from her current application vendors. These days, nearly all application vendors, major firms and minor companies alike, are busy exposing their application's key capabilities as services. While SOA pioneers had to craft many of these themselves by wrapping traditional application interfaces, the need to do so for packaged applications is diminishing quickly. Older and custom-built applications will still need service enablement, but today our typical CIO has hundreds or even thousands of services to work with, thanks to the efforts of her application vendors. The value in SOA for many companies will be in harnessing the power of their installed business applications. This reality tilts the competitive playing field in favor of the application vendors. Since most of the available services and much of the core business functionality she wants to leverage is provided by her application vendors, it is cheaper and less risky to select the tools that work best with her applications. In some cases, the application vendor will recommend tools from an independent platform vendor. In others, they will recommend their own tools. In either case, the merits of the SOA technology and provider will often be secondary to the recommendation of the application provider. In the mainstream SOA market, application vendor endorsements will be a key factor in determining which SOA providers rise to the top. 2. Getting to O Given the shortage of SOA skills in a typical company and the difficulty in building them, systems integrators are in position to reap a windfall of SOA projects in the coming years. As demand for skills accelerates faster than the supply of SOA talent, SOA will be a high growth, profitable market for consulting, much as the market for web consulting was at the end of the 1990s. Our CIO has relied on systems integrators in times of talent shortage in the past and will likely do so again with SOA. Some CIOs use consultants solely to bridge the gap while they build their own staff, but many others are outsourcing more IT to systems integrators, relying on them for implementation, development, and long-term support. In either case, the systems integrator will be educating our CIO and her staff about SOA and be involved in the key initial decisions they make on SOA technology. This will change the relationship between SOA software vendors and systems integrators. SOA software vendors will find themselves up against systems integrator gatekeepers in many sales cycles. The most successful software vendors in this environment will be the ones that provide the best growth and profits for the systems integrators. This may seem counterproductive for customers, but a CIO's job is to manage both the cost and the risk of delivering IT services to business customers. Partnering with a systems integrator that has done it before often reduces the risk of failure enough to compensate for any additional cost. As they have with so many other software markets, systems integrators will have tremendous influence on their mainstream customers, and will even help determine the eventual software market leaders. 3. Getting to A One of the most difficult challenges in building an SOA is creating an architecture that works with current realities and will support future business needs. To date, most of the SOA projects we've seen are a lot of S and O, and not so much A. SOA pioneers had to grow their own SOA gurus and develop their SOAs through trial and error. Some have told us it takes three times to get an architecture right. This is not an appealing option for mainstream companies. Our CIO faces a difficult problem. She doesn't have the wherewithal to hire and retain an experienced SOA architect. She is dependent on application vendors and systems integrators for much of her current architecture such as it is, and can't control the direction of many of her key applications. So, she is left only with the option of entrusting her company's SOA to a neophyte on staff or relying on vendor or system integrator partners... all of which are more than willing to oblige. While it is often said you can't buy an SOA, that's not entirely true. Companies can buy the beginnings of an SOA from some of the major systems integrators and ERP vendors today. IBM and other systems integrators are busy building starter SOAs (variously called fabrics, frameworks, and templates) for several vertical industries. These include the interrelated application services, foundational services, data structures, deployment models, management models, etc. needed for an SOA. They often include implementations of some of the key components and sometimes include a software vendor ecosystem committed to the architecture. Importantly, they also include methodologies for finalizing and implementing the architecture for a particular client. The major application vendors, namely SAP, Oracle and Infor, also offer SOA starter kits. For companies that have made strategic commitment to one of these application providers, these can be a real boon. The vendor defines the architecture with its application suite at its center, also defining how other applications should be plugged in, deployed, and managed. Because the application suite is at the center, our CIO gets access to a great deal of business functionality, much of it already in use by her business customers. The vendor often provides an ecosystem of software and service partners committed to the architecture for needs outside of the application suite. And the vendor provides support and enhancements to the architecture over time, so that the architecture stays in synch with the application suite. While no vendor or system integrator can provide our CIO with a packaged SOA, they can provide a good deal of one as a starting point. Faced with the choice of building an architecture from scratch or buying into the architecture of a partner, our mainstream CIO will likely favor working with a done-it-before partner. That decision will then limit, if not determine, her choice of SOA services and software providers. Ultimately, the partner that wins the nod for the architecture wins SOA account control, and SOA starter kits can win the architecture battle. Getting results Mainstream CIOs need results; not technology. If systems integrators and application vendors can help deliver those results faster and with less risk than platform vendors, they will win the early majority and come to lead the maturing SOA market. Today each provider is striving to define SOA to its own advantage, but ultimately it is the results-oriented, risk-averse early majority customers that will decide, with their dollars and euros, which vendors have gotten SOA right. The early adopters will continue to represent a sizeable, though demanding, segment of the overall market, but the early majority customers are likely to outspend them by a large factor over the next five years, effectively becoming the voice of the market. Their needs must be met. To prepare for this, vendors need to take a hard look at their strategies: How much money, resources, and skill are required to produce measurable business results with my offerings? How can I reduce them to below that of my competitors and how can I prove it? How can my offerings minimize the organizational transformation required? How can I be easier to adopt than the alternatives? How do I win the war for the corporate architecture? How can my offerings help CIOs tame their de facto architectures and turn them into SOAs better than any other provider? At current course and speed, SOA market leadership will likely pass to the systems integrators in some industries and application vendors in others, pushing the independent platform vendors to a supporting role in most parts of the market. That said, when has a technology market ever maintained course and speed? While we may see more changes like the proposed Oracle-BEA merger in the next three to five years, one thing will remain constant: the early majority customers will determine the shape of the market. SOA providers that want to lead the SOA market need to stop listening to their early adopter customers and start listening to their future prospects.>>
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