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W H I T E P A P E R
A r c h i t e c t e d t o L a s t :T h e E x p a n d i n g R e l e v a n c e o f S e r v i c e - O r i e n t e d A r c h i t e c t u r e
Sponsored by: IBM
Stephen D. Hendrick
April 2011
I D C O P I N I O N
The term service-oriented architecture (SOA) invokes differing responses depending
upon whom you talk to. Some members of the analyst community feel that SOA is in
need of a "makeover." C-level business managers sometimes grow nervous because
of the "A" word in the term SOA. Developers are generally supportive of what SOA
represents, and vendors would like to see a higher level of adoption and leverage of
SOA products.
What's missing from these stereotypes is a perspective on what is really happening in
the industry. The reality is that IT is in the midst of a very significant transition from
software to services. This transition is occurring because of architectural, technological,
and business model changes that are designed to expand and enhance the role of IT
within the enterprise. This transition from software to services is the next step in the
evolution of SOA and provides confirmation that the principles behind SOA are sound
and remain relevant in light of the changes that are occurring in IT.
The architectural bent of SOA creates some challenges for vendors in bringing SOA
products to market. However, modern application development, which is now largely
based on SOA principles, is proof that SOA's influence is expanding. The fact is thatSOA represents a change in software design that came about in the wake of the
distributed computing movement. As newer devices including tablets,
smartphones, and cloud services gain traction, SOA will become the de facto
standard for how the industry supports the growing appetite for software services.
I N T H I S W H I T E P A P E R
This white paper explores SOA's relationship with and relevance to IT and business.
The evolving software marketplace, which is transitioning from software to services,
provides a context for better understanding the role of SOA in application
development and deployment (AD&D) today and over the next five years. Recentsurvey-based research and IDC's top-line forecast for SOA are presented in this
paper and help communicate the value, opportunities, and challenges associated
with SOA.GlobalHead
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S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W
Although SOA has been with us in a formal way for a decade, the roots of SOA go
back to the beginnings of distributed computing. These roots run deep and have been
cultivated to yield an architecture that is abstract enough to ensure lasting relevance,
extensible enough to enable evolution and refinement, and focused enough to drive
value beyond the boundaries of IT and into the business of the enterprise.
F r o m S i l o s t o S e r v i c e s
The evolution of software over the past 20 years has involved a number of key
transitions. These transitions help explain how IT has evolved from its monolithic
origins into the siloed instantiation of IT today and to a more rationalized service-
oriented environment beyond.
One of the most important trends in application development is the transition from
coding all aspects of an application to developing applications that leverage runtime
componentry, typically in the form of a platform for application development and
deployment. This transition is very pronounced in the AD&D markets, which provide
the tools and technologies that professional developers use to build and deploy
applications. If we look at the spending on AD&D tools, we find that in 1990, 66% was
focused on tools to code applications and 34% was dedicated to tools to deploy
applications. In 1990, the majority of deployment spending was aligned with database
engines and transaction processing monitors. By 2010, spending on AD&D tools had
reversed. Only 23% was focused on tools to code applications and 77% was for tools
to deploy applications. However, by 2010, the array of deployment tools had grown
considerably from database engines and transaction processing (TP) monitors to
include products such as data services, application servers, integration servers,
business process management systems, business rule management systems,
browsers, and portal servers. Platforms allow vendors to bring many of these core
deployment products together to provide a more complete environment for both
building and deploying applications. This transition from development to deployment
by itself has facilitated an immense change in how we build applications.
One of the most obvious implications of this transition from development to
deployment is the change from coding to configuration. Modern deployment platforms
provide numerous runtime capabilities that speed application development while
simultaneously improving the quality of the application, leveraging well-vetted and
more highly abstracted platform components. Deployment platforms today provide
immense value and represent something akin to a "destination resort" for professional
developers because of the many capabilities that they now provide. These runtime
capabilities help simplify software development by abstracting away the lower-levelcoding that otherwise would be necessary. While we have not yet reached a point
where application development is completely configuration based, business process
management systems show that it is possible to come quite close to this objective.
Another implication of this transition from development to deployment is the support
that is provided for multitier application development. Deployment products are
designed with clear interfaces that enable them to receive, process, and deliver
content. Interfaces are required to leverage the runtime capabilities of the deployment
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product. Consequently, as deployment products were developed around the key
constructs for application development (data management, hosting, messaging,
processing, decisioning, and user interaction), support expanded from one-tier, to
two-tier, to three-tier and n-tier application development. The advantages that come
from loosely coupled components are well documented but are really possible only by
standardizing how components interface with each other.
A more recent implication of this transition from development to deployment is cloud
computing. The most compelling characteristics of cloud computing are its shared
service and self-service models. The shared service model picks up where
virtualization leaves off. Virtualization abstracts away the complexity of managing a
heterogeneous collection of servers while simultaneously driving utilization rates
higher. A shared service model similarly provides increased efficiency by driving
higher utilization of active application instances, which reduces the number of
instances and helps consolidate resources and reduce system complexity. A shared
service model also places a premium on the separation of concerns principle because
a higher level of autonomy must be introduced to isolate users, data, and process.
Likewise, vendors that offer cloud services must build their products to a higher
standard to ensure that they can reliably meet the service-level agreements (SLAs)
that they define with their customers. Consequently, these cloud services must have
a very explicit interface and a well-defined usage model to ensure their successful
use in a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud.
Figure 1 brings many of these transformative characteristics together in one diagram.
The differing approaches to application development in Figure 1 have a long life span
and are both additive and cumulative. In other words, with each new generational
approach to application development, new technologies and techniques are
introduced that provide more effective ways to build or integrate applications. These
new technologies and techniques usually don't replace existing tools, but they do
provide better ways to address business needs.
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F I G U R E 1
F r o m S i l o t o S e r v i c e : T h e T r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f I T
Source: IDC, 2011
This description of key changes that have occurred in application development and
deployment over the past 20 years is intended to provide a context for better
understanding the contributions of SOA.
Figure 1 mixes approaches to service development (2GL, 3GL, 4GL, SOA) with
service delivery (cloud). This is one of the reasons why cloud services, which can
conceptually support any method of service development, have such expansive reach
across abstraction, style, and structure.
K e y S O A C o n s t r u c t s a n d A t t r i b u t e s
SOA in itself was an evolution of industry thinking around distributed computing and
componentization. The key principles that guided the development of SOA includeservice modularity, interoperability, standardization, identification, and provisioning.
These principles remain operative today because they reflect an elegant balance
between being specific enough to drive adoption yet abstract enough to be
extensible.
The transition from development to deployment that began 20 years ago occurred
because the software industry was engaged, as it is today, in a quest for better
capabilities that translate into economic value for customers and vendors alike.
2GL3GL
4GL
SOA
Higher
Lower
Abstraction
Code Configure
Past Future
Time
Development
Deployment
Style
Structure
Cloud
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The path of this evolution represents the collective thinking of the world's most
talented technology officers and exists for a reason. The path we are on from silo to
service represents an extraordinarily well-conceived approach to building applications
that encompasses most of what we know about software architecture and design.
SOA itself was built on decades of accumulated experience in how to build and how not
to build applications and systems. Subroutines, remote procedure calls (RPCs), the
Component Object Model (COM), the Common Object Request Broker Architecture
(CORBA), the PC, client/server, the distributed computing environment (DCE), and
many other industry efforts influenced what SOA is today. It's important to recognize
that SOA is well into its first decade of use and has outlived many of its predecessors.
The path that we are on for the near term will stress services more heavily as will the
variety of new delivery models for these services. Consequently, as we transition from
software to software as a service, more mature SOA principles will be increasingly
needed to ensure efficiency and manageability in the face of added complexity.
SOA enables us to define services, which are collections of tasks that are made
accessible through an interface. Service contracts control how services can be
accessed, and flexibility around service implementation ensures wide-ranging
environmental support. The message-based architecture of SOA is what enables
services to be loosely coupled and developed in granular ways that facilitate reuse.
However, for SOA services to communicate effectively, services must be accessible.
Accessibility is accomplished by two additional constructs: a registry that oversees
service access and an enterprise service bus (ESB) that enables the movement of
messages between services. The design of SOA makes it effective at establishing a
wide range of services that can be sourced from existing legacy systems or built from
scratch and connected together to facilitate interoperability or reengineered to
facilitate integration.
T h e R o l e o f S O A i n t h e E n t e r p r i s e
SOA is interesting in that it provides value to both IT and the business. The architectural
focus of SOA provides IT with a framework to address both tactical and strategic
development tasks. The service orientation of SOA is aligned with the needs of the
business because business services are the building blocks of business processes,
which uniquely identify and position the business relative to its competitors.
In practical terms, SOA is seeing use in businesses to address integration tasks. The
siloed characteristic of most organizations makes it difficult to define business
processes that span silos. Point-to-point connectivity is one way to address
interoperability needs but fails to meet requirements pertaining to maintainability,
scalability, and extensibility. SOA provides a generalized framework for addressinginteroperability and integration.
The real benefit of SOA is that it is able to appeal to organizations on any level. There
is value for both IT and the business, the architecture of SOA allows it to relate
effectively to both legacy and modern applications, and SOA can support a wide array
of activities ranging from simple system-to-system interoperability to being the
underlying architecture for new system design with high levels of component reuse.
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Organizations today are using IT in many different ways to improve their competitive
position. A 2010 IDC survey of 300 organizations in North America found that
application integration was the leading IT approach and was used by 62% of
respondents to advance their competitive position, as shown in Figure 2. Risk
management and compliance ran a close second at 61%, followed by mobility
solutions (58%), business intelligence (56%), collaboration (54%), and application
modernization (51%). SOA has applicability to all of these activities, although how
SOA is leveraged differs by organization size.
F I G U R E 2
T h e L e a d i n g W a y s i n W h i c h O r g a n i z a t i o n s P l a n t o B e M o r e
C o m p e t i t i v e
Q. What usage plans does your organization have for each of the following ways to be more
competitive?
n = 300
Note: Multiple responses were allowed.
Source: IDC's 2010 SOA and Cloud Survey
We then looked at the organizations focused on application integration and examined
the extent to which they used SOA to support various types of integration efforts.
Figure 3 shows that where application integration is a primary way in which
organizations planned to be more competitive, SOA was used by 50% of
organizations to address data integration needs and 44% of organizations to address
application integration needs. This indicates that where integration is a priority, SOA
is a short-listed technology for addressing integration needs.
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Application modernization
Collaboration
Business intelligence
Mobility solutions
Risk management and
compliance
Application integration
Using Will use 20112013
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F I G U R E 3
R e l i a n c e o n S O A i n O r g a n i z a t i o n s T h a t A r e U s i n g A p p l i c a t i o n
I n t e g r a t i o n t o I n c r e a s e T h e i r C o m p e t i t i v e P o s i t i o n
n = 300
Source: IDC's 2010 SOA and Cloud Survey
When we look at the use of SOA by company size, the results are even more
interesting. Small organizations (5099 employees) rely on SOA primarily to address
current business challenges. Despite the limited IT resources of small organizations,
SOA is understood to be an effective way for IT to respond to acute business needs
in an efficient way. Medium-sized organizations (1001,499 employees) rely on SOA
primarily to address data integration tasks. While data integration is clearly a tactical
use of SOA, it is an effective way to break down the silos that can exist in
organizations and begin to make progress on master data management needs. Large
organizations (1,500 or more employees) rely on SOA primarily to address application
modernization needs. It is no surprise that application modernization is a key
objective for large organizations given the size and diversity of their IT portfolio andthe benefits of using SOA as a key architectural principle for guiding new application
and system design.
Using
Will use
20112013
Evaluating
Don't know
No plans to
use
SOAEnabled
Data Integration
Using
Will use
20112013
Evaluating
Don't know
No plans to
use
SOAEnabled
Application Integration
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O b s e r v e d S O A B e n e f i t s a n d C h a l l e n g e s
SOA Benefits
As part of the 2010 North American survey cited earlier, we asked organizations
about the benefits they were experiencing from using SOA as well as the challenges
they faced in using SOA.
SOA benefits in order of importance were as follows:
1. Improved business agility
2. Faster response time to change requests
3. Reduced cost of application integration
4. More flexibility in application development
5. Reduced cost of data integration
Improved business agility, which was the leading benefit cited in this survey, is a
frequently cited benefit of SOA. The ability to expose content through services and
move data between applications provides organizations with tremendous flexibility in
leveraging existing data and business processes. This ability to establish new
business processes by leveraging existing assets where possible makes application
development more efficient and more consistent.
Faster response time to change requests is a related benefit to improved business
agility in that technologies that make organizations more agile typically do so because
they are more efficient and consequently allow many types of changes to be
accomplished faster.
Reduced costs associated with application integration stem from a much higher
degree of custom code and unique point-to-point integrations that would otherwise be
necessary. We would also infer that these benefits would extend not only to
development activities but also to maintenance.
More flexibility in application development can follow from SOA involvement of
additional application infrastructure, including an ESB, a registry, and a repository, but
is clearly rooted in SOA's ability to support the development of loosely coupled
systems with a potentially high degree of component reuse.
The reduced cost of data integration was cited as another SOA benefit. We expect
that this is the case because of the ease with which SOA can facilitate interoperability
between data sources and provide an in-context capability when integrating and
unifying data.
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SOA Challenges
Material SOA challenges in order of importance were as follows:
1. SOA requires a sizable investment in tools.
2. SOA is slow to show value.
3. Gaining business buy-in for SOA is difficult.
SOA requires a degree of investment to show value. Deployment products such as an
ESB, a registry, and a repository are incremental investments necessary to extract
the full value from SOA. However, these products typically have a fast time to value
for organizations that commit to SOA due to the core capabilities that these
foundational technologies provide.
SOA can be slow to show value depending upon the mix of pending requirements in
queue. Early SOA projects have a learning curve, and the benefits of SOA increase
geometrically as organizations build out their inventory of SOA services. So while it is
a fair criticism of SOA, being slow to show value does not mean that SOA is
challenged to show immense value.
Gaining business buy-in for SOA can be a challenge. SOA is an architectural
approach that is supported by a degree of runtime infrastructure and standards.
Business executives looking for an overt and significant quid pro quo when being
pitched an initial SOA project may find it difficult to understand why new technology is
necessary to address what could be a simple task. This is a legitimate challenge that
faces SOA and requires a response built around a firm commitment to SOA so that
time to value is kept short and the value gathers momentum and increases as
additional SOA projects are addressed.
T h e B u s i n e s s V a l u e o f S O A
Another question that we asked as part of our 2010 North American survey was
directly focused on the business value of SOA. Figure 4 displays the results to the
following question: Can you quantify the business value of establishing SOA within
your company? The results reflect the beliefs of SOA users from the survey sample.
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F I G U R E 4
T h e B u s i n e s s V a l u e o f S O A
Q. Can you quantify the business value of establishing SOA within your company?
n = 220
Source: IDC's 2010 SOA and Cloud Survey
A total of 49% of SOA users reported that SOA shows some or significant business
value that would justify continued investment in SOA. About 18% of SOA users said
that they lacked information that would allow them to measure the value that SOA is
providing them. A surprising 14% experienced little or no business value from SOA,
and 19% either didn't know or were unsure how much business value was provided
by SOA.
It is encouraging that about half of SOA users are seeing material business value
from SOA. For those users who are unable to measure the business value of SOA,
we would estimate that about half of them would see value in SOA if it was
measurable or they did know. Therefore, we would expect that the majority of SOAusers see real value from SOA. Given the benefits and challenges observed in this
survey, these results are consistent with and characteristic of a technology that offers
significant value but requires organizational commitment.
Some or
significant
business value
Unable to
measure value
Little or no
business value
Don't know
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F U T U R E O U T L O O K
S O A ' s T r a n s f o r m a t i v e R o l e i n I T a n d B u s i n e s s
If we elect to use the cloud as a benchmark for important transformative trends
occurring in IT, it would be interesting to see how important SOA and SOA-supported
technologies are in helping the cloud be successful. We asked respondents to identify
the technologies that are necessary for success in using AD&D tools in the cloud.
Figure 5 shows their responses.
F I G U R E 5
T e c h n o l o g i e s N e c e s s a r y f o r S u c c e s s o f A D & D C l o u d S e r v i c e s
Q. Which of the following technologies are necessary for success in using AD&D tools in the
cloud?
n = 300
Note: Multiple responses were allowed.
Source: IDC's 2010 SOA and Cloud Survey
Topping the list of key technologies to make AD&D tools in the cloud successful is
Web services, which was identified by 46% of respondents. Given the important role
of the Internet in the delivery of cloud services, we would expect Web services to rank
highly. Web services follow an interaction pattern that is becoming aligned with SOA.
The evolution of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) has moved away from
its RPC, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and port orientation to a more
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 50%
No cloud familiarity
Don't know or not sure
Other
WS Security standards
WS* standards
SOAP and REST
Registry and repository
Messaging and ESB
XML
SCA
Multitenant architecture
SOA
Web services
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flexible and abstracted definition supporting Representational State Transfer (REST)
and interface-oriented specifications. This evolution indicates an increasing alignment
between Web services and SOA. This alignment will be enhanced as Web services
borrow SOA infrastructural capabilities to enable better scalability, maintainability, and
governance.
Second on the list of key technologies to support AD&D cloud services is SOA, which
was identified by 38% of respondents. This confirms the critical role of SOA in
facilitating the design and access of cloud services. Given the flexibility,
configurability, scalability, extensibility, and maintainability required of cloud services,
SOA is currently the best architecture for ensuring that these needs are met. These
attributes are equally important to ISVs looking to build cloud services and to end
users who want a high degree of configurability and interoperability when using public
or private cloud services. The primary difference between services and cloud services
is that cloud services have to be built to a higher standard to meet availability and
reliability requirements. The architectural, infrastructural, and standardized
characteristics of SOA make it a good match as a foundational technology for AD&D
cloud services.
Multitenancy is followed by four technologies that are ranked closely in terms of
importance: Service Component Architecture (SCA) at 23%, Extensible Markup
Language (XML) at 23%, messaging and ESB at 22%, and registry and repository at
21%. These technologies are core to SOA, and together they account for much of the
runtime and design time value of SOA. The strong support for SCA was especially
interesting because SCA brings specificity to service composition, which helps ensure
the value-add of SOA. SCA and the related Service Data Object (SDO) standards are
important SOA drivers, and their high relative ranking in this survey question suggests
that principles and mechanics of addressing SOA are understood.
S O A a n d P l a t f o r m C o m p u t i n g
Earlier in this paper we discussed the transition from development to deployment.
Given the many advantages of platform-based application development, it is useful to
consider what this means. Although the SOA specification leaves plenty of room for
interpretation when it comes to implementation, all of the leading platform providers
provide infrastructural support for the key constructs of SOA, including ESB and
registry and repository. This degree of support from platform providers is designed to
help accelerate the adoption of SOA, speed application development, and improve
application quality and reliability. The transition to platform-based development and
deployment is for developers who are building custom applications and is becoming
the foundation for more and more packaged applications. The qualities that make
SOA desirable for custom application development carry over just as easily into thepackaged application realm.
The transition from silos to services also gave birth to the idea of on-demand
capabilities. A key characteristic of services is their interface, which enables a service
to be provided and consumed. This service orientation made it much easier for
application functionality to be decomposed and consumed on demand. Key to this on-
demand style of computing is the messaging that enables the consumer to issue a
request and the provider to serve the consumer content. This on-demand style of
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computing is characteristic of a person-to-system (P2S) interaction pattern. The next
evolutionary step in computing styles, which is starting to occur, is support for the
system-to-person (S2P) interaction pattern. The S2P interaction pattern will enable
devices (and the people who carry them) to be contacted in real time when a
recognizable opportunity or concern occurs. Given that many devices like
smartphones have geospatial awareness, the potential of the S2P interaction pattern
is immense. The purpose of highlighting these interaction patterns is that the
message-based metaphor for communicating is just as well suited for P2S as it is for
S2P or system-to-system (S2S) interactions. Consequently, the messaging-based
orientation of SOA that is becoming common in supporting P2S interactions will be
equally effective at supporting these newer S2P and S2S interaction patterns.
S O A G r o w t h D r i v e r s a n d F o r e c a s t
The worldwide SOA market consists of license, maintenance, and subscription
revenues of products that provide or leverage SOA capabilities. A degree of SOA
revenue therefore exists in almost every software market that IDC follows. IDC sizes
the SOA market using a revenue allocation model and then forecasts future SOArevenue based on assumptions regarding what is likely to drive or inhibit SOA growth.
Growth Drivers and Inhibitors
IDC has identified a variety of key drivers and inhibitors that largely account for the
overall growth of the SOA market. The leading drivers and inhibitors are described as
follows:
! Market momentum. The service- and standards-oriented principles of SOA ensure
continued strong adoption of SOA. The current low level of market penetration also
ensures plenty of enterprises with compelling use cases. SOA is a key go-to-
market message for most leading ISVs that are seeking to promote applications,
platforms, and systems with broad-based extensibility and scalability. Overall
momentum as measured in growth will remain robust because there are no other
meaningful alternatives from the standpoint of technology choices.
! Agility. The componentized approach to application development supported by
SOA enables a level of flexibility and reuse that over time improves time to
market and application quality. The combination of these characteristics is what
best defines agility.
! Application and data integration use cases. SOA excels in addressing
integration needs given its service and message-oriented architecture. These
use cases will continue to drive revenue growth despite their limited ability to
improve IT operations through reuse or reengineering.
! IT governance. Governance is a key issue for large enterprises and will help
drive SOA growth due to the explicit monitoring and management provided by
SOA runtime technologies, including ESB, registry, and repository.
! Software as a service. The transition from software to services helps reinforce
SOA messaging and promotes SOA principles.
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! Complexity. SOA requires investment in development and runtime tooling.
Tactical SOA integration projects are easy to implement but may not be short on
financial return and will initially add to system complexity. Consequently, we see
the complexity of SOA as an inhibitor until an organization leverages the
technology enough to begin seeing engineering and operational benefits from
scale and reuse.
SOA Forecast
The outlook for SOA is consistent with the perspectives from our recent cloud and
SOA survey. IDC research estimates that revenue for SOA in 2010 totaled about
$8.1 billion, reflecting an increase of 37% over 2009. The outlook for SOA over the
20112015 forecast period is positive due to the moderate overall penetration of SOA
to date combined with strong cloud services trends that are aligned with and will help
emphasize SOA principles and products.
Figure 6 shows the worldwide 20062015 SOA revenue forecast segmented by
primary market.
F I G U R E 6
W o r l d w i d e 2 0 0 6 2 0 1 5 S O A R e v e n u e F o r e c a s t b y P r i m a r y M a r k e t
Source: IDC, 2011
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
($B)
System infrastructure software AD&D Applications
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Revenue in the AD&D segment accounted for over 52% of total SOA revenue in 2010
due to the large number of SOA tools, including ESB, registry, repository, SOA
connectors and adapters, and SOA development environments that reside in the
AD&D market. The overall SOA market is expected to have a compound annual
growth rate (CAGR) of just over 24%, which will drive revenue from $8.1 billion in
2010 to $24.4 billion in 2015. Overall growth for SOA is expected to reach 37% in
2011 and decline over the forecast period, as adoption continues, to 19% by 2015.
The AD&D market segment will see the highest growth, followed by applications and
then system infrastructure software.
C H A L L E N G E S / O P P O R T U N I T I E S
As outlined in this white paper, the opportunities clearly outnumber the challenges
that SOA faces. A tactical emphasis on data and application integration is often what
brings organizations to SOA but the real value of SOA is realized as organizations
standardize their approach to application development and adopt modern application
development techniques that share a services and business process focus and never
lose sight of the architectural discipline that SOA brings to IT activities.
If there is one challenge for SOA, it is the complexity of moving beyond the tactical
tasks associated with interoperability and data or application integration. While
integration tasks provide a logical SOA entry point, the challenge is recognizing the
potential of SOA to move beyond simplistic veneer-like interoperability tasks akin to
integration on the glass. SOA offers the capability to develop new applications as
services as well as reengineer existing applications in a variety of ways, ranging from
top-down wrappering of legacy code logic to bottom-up redevelopment using modern
platform-centric application development techniques.
Today's focus on application development is closely linked to software delivery as a
service. Consequently, this increased emphasis by the industry on public and privatecloud services means that the focus of SOA will begin to shift from top-down
interfaces and interoperability to bottom-up implementation. Although SOA today is
capable of supporting this bottom-up reengineering of applications, these types of
development activities can be difficult because they leverage new platform
infrastructure and require a higher degree of foresight regarding application and
system design to ensure the right level of service granularity and reuse. While such
reengineering and rehosting tasks are clearly challenging, the software industry could
and should do more to reduce task complexity. One example of how this issue could
be addressed is to build a higher degree of SOA support into architectural tools.
Another example would be to embed ESB and messaging capabilities in the
operating system to provide pervasive SOA service availability.
C O N C L U S I O N
SOA's relevance is now stronger than ever, although the software industry's fondness
for new terminology and messaging seems to suggest that SOA is showing its age.
However, SOA's tenure in the industry is its best attribute, and the industry's current
intense focus on services means that SOA's contribution to the industry is now larger
than ever. Survey data that we have presented, while falling short of a wholesale
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endorsement of SOA, speaks to its expanding adoption and significant role in
supporting application development today. Vendor revenues for SOA continue to
expand as well due to the pervasive transition from software to services that adhere
to SOA principles. While it is clear that SOA provides very tangible support for data
and application integration activities, the role of SOA is expanding to include IT
governance and application modernization.
The industry could and should do more to ease the process of SOA-based application
modernization. Some progress is being made on this today, as evidenced by the BPMN
2.0 specification that now supports a new variant on messaging (events) and extending
the service model to better support business rule processing. Added industry efforts
around domain-specific solution accelerators and process compositions, which
comprise upgradable data models, process models, business rules, and UIs, are an
effective way to deliver SOA-based componentry that combines the best that SOA and
modern application development and deployment have to offer.
The net of this is that SOA continues to exert a high degree of influence as the
architectural foundation for modern application development and deployment tooling.
This virtually ensures the lasting relevance of SOA and implies wider adoption of and
reliance on SOA as a foundational technology for all applications.
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