SOA Adoption

SOA adoption is on the rise. According to an IDC survey of various IT roles, companies currently anticipate building out their SOA foundation. Right now, they report that 25% of their applications are Web-based. In addition, they are planning to double their SOA-based applications in the next two years (from 10% to 20%). Findings also show that currently IT environments are extremely heterogeneous and combine multiple generations of technology. As a result, SOA evolution will be incremental, incorporating existing technologies.

IDC, Developer Collaborative 2007

Organizations report heterogeneous IT environments—with SOA adoption on the rise. IDC, "Developer Collaborative," 2007 (IDC #206730).

What's driving SOA adoption? IDC research reveals the underlying story about a high-pressure, rapidly changing business environment and the demands it's placing on IT to better serve the business.

Business Trends Driving SOA Adoption

According to IDC's "Services and Software Leading Indicators" (2007), businesses today operate in a rapidly changing, increasingly distributed and fragmented environment. They are beset by global forces of change from demanding customer expectations and increasing consolidation and competition, to managing margins and risk, complying with regulations, and controlling costs. And what is different from before is that change—in business conditions, business operations, and technology--is relentless and increasing in rapidity. So speed and agility in responding to opportunities and pressure are critical.

As a result, it's not surprising that key business concerns over the next 12 months include:

  • Providing better service to customers
  • Improving the operational productivity of employees
  • Responding faster to changing business dimensions
  • Long-run cost reduction
  • Improving access to and leveraging company knowledge
  • Better differentiating current offerings from the competition

IT Concerns Driving SOA Adoption

What does management want from IT to address these concerns and support the business better? According to the IDC Line of Business Executive Survey, 2007, delivering business value in this high-pressure environment is top of mind for executives. Accordingly, business executives want IT to:

  • Speed up business project delivery
  • Provide more high-business value services
  • Improve IT operational reliability and security
  • Understand the business better.

Specific "top-three" improvements they are seeking include:

  • Improved, integrated access to relevant data and information
  • Real-time (or near-real-time) business performance monitoring
  • Faster development and deployment of new business applications
  • Faster ability to make operational changes
  • Improved performance from the IT infrastructure
  • Lower application and maintenance costs.

Learn Why SOA Adoption Is On the Rise

Find out about the key business and IT trends driving SOA adoption. Register to watch the On-Demand Webinar, "Continuous Service Optimization: How to Use SOA to Better Serve Your Business Goals."

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A key theme here is the need for IT to better support the business: through better information access in general, visibility into business performance in particular, and better, more flexible control, including the ability to rapidly meet business needs with faster application development and deployment, faster operational changes, and faster IT performance.

These improvements are all characteristics of an SOA and map to the specific top reasons organizations are adopting SOA: internal integration (for better information access), re-useable code (for faster application development/deployment and lower IT costs), and the ability to adjust more readily to changing business needs.

But one issue remains. Organizations want IT in general and SOA in particular to deliver more business value. But how can they monitor business (not just IT) performance, to get business insight and direction into making operational changes that support the business? How can they automate business priorities into SOA systems?

Successful SOA Adoption—with Progress® Actional®

One key to successful SOA adoption—i.e., aligning an SOA to meet business needs—is Progress® Actional® for Continuous Service Optimization. Actional relates end-to-end business process execution to underlying IT activity—delivering business metrics related to runtime operations, such as order-to-fulfillment times, for viewing and rich analytics on a differentiated basis: by individual customer, customer groups, regions, etc., including custom-defined metrics. In addition, management dashboards offer historical data on SOA usage in easy-to-use graphical formats and "management friendly" reports.

This information allows organizations to make and prioritize IT decisions and optimize SOA service delivery dynamically or manually, to ensure quality of service, for example, for key customers.

For More Information on Successful SOA Adoption

Join Sandy Rogers, IDC analyst, and Dan Foody, Vice President of Actional products at Progress for a Webinar on how you can adopt and evolve an SOA that delivers ongoing value. Download the Webinar "Continuous Service Optimization: How to Use SOA to Better Serve Your Business Goals."