SOA growth and change: TechTarget survey shows SaaS, BPM emerging
According to a writeup on a recent survey from SearchSOA/Techtarget, SOA is growing strong at the enterprise level, as evidenced by this excerpt -
Despite some bad press of SOA at the start of the year, SOA is in fact motoring forward. Among the survey respondents, 49% said their organization has one or more SOA projects under way, and 60% characterize their current or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to departmental/divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%).
The TechTarget SOA Survey 2009 was conducted in February of this year. Respondents comprised a mix of developers, architects, C-level execs, managers, consultants and others, the article stated.
Integration is still top of the list for drivers for SOA projects -
The top benefits organizations hope to achieve are improved data integration (32%), enable legacy application integration (32%) and integrated disparate department applications (23%), followed by cost cutting (21%). Staying competitive (8.4%) and driving innovation (8%) tracked low on the expected benefits list.
My experience working with customers in the past several months certainly corroborates this. As always, governance ranks high as a challenge as well as organizational buy-in, and according to Gartner's Massimo Pezzini who was quoted in the article, those not adopting SOA say it is due to lack of skills.
It was refreshing to hear that software architects and their development teams are looking toward infrastructure software such as grid and cloud computing, and that software-as-a-service (SaaS), mobile and composite applications are clearly on application development managers' radar. The aritcle also goes on to say that SOA can assist in controlling expenses and technology overhead, while BPM as a complement to SOA "is an immediate opportunity for customers to get benefits".
There's not much earth-shattering here to me, as I hear and see this stuff all the time from customers. But it is good to see some sobering industry validation amidst all the anti-hype.
Dave
