Does "reuse" bring value to enterprises? Does Java EE have a future in SOA? Is SOA in danger of being swept away by the "Web 2.0" paradigm?
Over the past few months, there has been a lot of heated discussion swirling around some of these fundamental "givens" of service-oriented architecture. One can be forgiven for wondering if SOA was already teetering on the edge of irrelevancy, long before it had a chance to prove its potential.
Evans Data approached some of these questions in a survey of 400 development managers earlier this summer. The survey, which originally was created with a Web services theme a few years ago, has been increasingly gravitating to SOA topics as well. I analyzed the results and authored the final report for Evans, which found significant growth in various aspects of Web services and SOA.
First off, the survey found the percentage of functioning SOAs (defined for survey purposes as "a series of standardized, shared, loosely coupled services representing one or more business processes") has almost doubled. Twenty-four percent of respondents are saying they currently implement SOA, an 85% increase from 2005.
While actual number of services is a crude measurement of the scale of SOA, this is, nonetheless, on the rise as well. Thirty percent of respondents expected to be using more than 20 services over the next year, a 58% increase over current levels.
While there is a raging debate about the value of reuse, the survey found the practice is on the rise. Respondents to this survey seemed to think reuse was a pretty good thing -- three out of ten said the ability to reuse services is the greatest cost advantage to Web services -- leading the list of various cost benefits. (Reduced integration expenditures followed in second place.) The survey also found that more than 50% of enterprises now share services between two or more business units -- a 20% increase since the last survey in mid-2005.
Then there are the questions over the fate of the Java Platform as the world moves to SOA. Burton Group's Richard Monson-Haefel may be predicting Java EE's ultimate demise, but that didn't show up in this year's survey. In fact, the survey found a rise in adoption of the Java platform for Web services and SOA. Three out of four companies expect to be working with the Java Platform by next year, a 12% jump from current levels -- and still a step ahead of .NET, by the way.
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