The number of companies investing in service-oriented architecture (SOA)
has doubled over the past year in every part of the world, with a
typical annual spend of nearly $1.4 million, according to a new research
report from the analyst firm AMR Research that surveyed 405 companies in
the U.S., Germany, and China. Now the bad news: "Hundreds of millions of
dollars will be invested pursuing these markets in 2008, much of it
wasted," said AMR analyst Ian Finley. The AMR survey found that most
companies don't really know why they are investing in SOA, which Finley
said makes long-term commitment iffy. Often, there are multiple reasons
cited within any organization, letting SOA appear as a buzzword
justification for unrelated individual priorities. "People more easily
rally around a thing rather than five things... that lack of a rallying
purpose for SOA calls its momentum into question." Finley is concerned
that SOA may not get picked up much beyond the early adopters -- mainly
financial services, telecommunications, and government organizations
that are more often than not predisposed to the value of architecture
and thus more willing to pursue SOA for less-quantifiable benefits --
unless a coherent set of benefits is made clear. Another danger seen
from the SOA survey is that the main benefit that the vendors sell around
SOA (code reuse) is not the real benefit that early SOA adopters have
gotten. Often the code from project A is irrelevant to project B, he
noted. That focus on reuse can cause organizations to dismiss SOA's
benefits because they're looking at the wrong metric.
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