SOA Management Drivers

According to an Aberdeen Group survey, the two top SOA management drivers among companies with Web services or service-oriented architecture (SOA) are developing new business capabilities (46%) and managing IT complexity (42%). In addition, 48% of companies with more mature SOAs (i.e., 24 or more months experience in deploying an SOA) are investing time and money in SOA management to deal with SOA IT complexity. (Aberdeen Group, "Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle," January 2007.)

Why is there a difference in focus between companies with more mature SOAs and the others? Once companies have more than a few Web services, in order to develop and support new business capabilities successfully they must tackle several SOA management and governance challenges that arise from SOA complexity.

SOA Management Drivers: Tackling IT Complexity

Specifically, the primary challenges identified by Aberdeen survey participants in dealing with IT complexity were:

• For 44%--establishing operational security, governance, and management
• For 39%--handling security issues that differed from older IT security issues
• For 38%--scaling to the production volumes and achieving the SOA operations reliability and availability required to meet service-level agreements (SLAs)

This is not surprising. SOA business processes consist of service components that perform a specific business task. But these components execute across distributed, heterogeneous systems, so that monitoring and managing them for usage volume and reliability are not possible with traditional IT management systems designed to handle an enterprise application silo. Furthermore, different types of security may be required for different services in an SOA application, and the same service may be subject to different security requirements when it is used in more than one process.

Also not surprising are the top responses to these challenges. In order to establish operational security, management, and governance, in addition to revising their application lifecycle process, engaging consultants, and increasing training, companies are purchasing or planning to purchase SOA operations management software (28% of survey participants) and security software (26% of survey participants).

SOA Management Drivers: Higher SOA ROI with the Right Technology

Investments in the right SOA technology are paying off. More than 80% of the "best-in-class" companies, so deemed because of their SOA knowledge, processes, technologies, and financial metrics, have automated solutions for SOA operations and governance, typically purchased from third-party vendors.

In addition, 68% of these "best-in-class" companies are receiving positive ROI and lower application development costs, while 77% of all companies surveyed have not yet received their SOA payback. In fact, 40% of the "best-in-class" have received payback of $1 million or more.

Progress Actional for SOA Management

For companies responding to SOA management drivers such as IT complexity, Progress® Actional® can provide products to get control of operations and ensure runtime governance through consistent enforcement of security, compliance, and business policies, such as SLAs.

In particular, Progress Actional for SOA Operations provides automatic end-to-end visibility into SOA processes, enabling companies to monitor SOA performance and troubleshoot problems quickly. This visibility includes insight into all service dependencies as well as metrics on service usage and availability, helping companies to meet SLAs and to plan system capacity to support service reuse, which, in turn, helps to lower SOA application costs. In addition, Progress Actional for Active Policy Enforcement ensures companies enforce security, compliance and other policies (such as service-level agreements) consistently across an SOA.

For More Information on SOA Management Drivers and Solutions

Find out more about what is driving companies to adopt SOA management and governance solutions and the resulting benefits, read "Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle" (Aberdeen Group, January 2007).