SOA knowledge lacking

By Warwick Ashford for HP
London, 24 May 2007

HP plans to tap into the service-oriented architecture (SOA) market, introducing a new software and support services package in London this week.

The package is aimed at helping organisations adopt SOA by promising to mitigate risk and deliver measurable short-term business benefits.

Software vendors claim SOA is moving from proof-of-concept to mainstream, but a research group says a lack of knowledge is still limiting its adoption.

According to Butler Group research, only one-third of organisations have actually begun implementing SOA projects, while 39% of the market is still evaluating SOA and 33% has yet to take any action.

"Factors such as SOA maturity and limited IT budgets are less of a problem than they used to be, but lack of market knowledge and industry expertise are still major obstacles to SOA adoption," says Tim Jennings, Butler Group research director.

SOA budgets

Roman Stanek, SOA director for HP in Europe, Middle East and Africa, agrees. Adamant that SOA is becoming mainstream, he says most customers throughout the region now have an SOA budget.

The company's new software and support services package is aimed at helping organisations adopt SOA by promising to mitigate risk and deliver measurable short-term business benefits.

Stanek says the new business technology optimisation (BTO) for SOA offering is designed to help organisations address some of the biggest challenges in SOA adoption, including bridging the divide between business and IT.

"The software delivers the strong governance, quality and management across the whole service life cycle from design and development, to operations and maintenance that HP believes is critical for a successful SOA implementation," he says.

In addition to the software, HP's BTO offering includes an SOA Centre of Excellence and a free Web-based SOA maturity self-assessment tool to help educate the market and promote industry expertise, Stanek explains.

Although confident SOA will shape the future of IT delivery, Stanek concedes most organisations will run older systems in parallel with SOA projects for at least the next five years.

"There will be no instant switch from one to the other, but rather an incremental migration." He also says there will be no SOA success without the collaborative involvement of both business and IT.