AMR in a survey conducted late last year in which they asked respondents about their biggest challenges managing systems. Integration issues (25%), pace of change (24%), and cost of change (21%) are the barriers that organizations face when trying to meet customer and competitive demands.Below are some excerpts from the article by Dennis Gaughan.

In a nutshell, the above stated statistic is the root cause behind the overwhelming market buzz around service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is an architectural approach to building and maintaining systems designed to make change much easier by breaking systems up into more manageable (and reusable - we have dicussed reusable before in this blog in the SOA context) services. With SOA, you can make changes to a service or a number of services while minimizing the impact to applications that use the service. More importantly, SOA is about connecting those services in new and distinct ways, orchestrating improved and more flexible business processes from existing assets.

In fact, many of the early examples of SOA that we see are directly targeted at the business drivers captured in the spending survey:

• Customer issues-Several customers are using web services and SOA concepts to create new interaction points with customers. By combining customer information from multiple systems into one composite application, companies are looking to grow revenue from their customer base by making it easier to do business with them.
• Competitive issues-Faster time to market is perhaps the most often cited reason for exploring SOA. This is particularly true in industries like high-tech, financial services, and telecommunications where the first to market with a new product or service is the one that captures the largest market share.

What is important to note is that SOA is neither a product you buy nor a panacea, but rather an approach that requires careful planning, effective change management processes, and strong governance in addition to technology. The companies that are successful adopting SOA will focus on the first three before they address number four.

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Prashanth Rai