At this year's InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum, which is taking place this week in New York, no one is debating the merits of going to SOA. Rather, the tone of this season's gathering is, 'SOA is a reality at most companies. Now, how do we maximize the value of these implementations?'
I had the opportunity to attend Tuesday's proceedings. The first day's session was kicked off by AT&T's Rich Erickson, who described how the telecom giant has seen $40 million in "very real savings" as a result of its five-year evolution to SOA. At the core of the SOA are up to 75 reusable services and interfaces backed up by a mic of ESBs, integration brokers, and interop approaches.
Erickson noted that like many large, diverse organizations, AT&T faced considerable resistance to its Web services and SOA efforts. After a couple of years of struggle, the defining moment came when Erickson's team gained executive support from AT&T's senior VP in charge of systems engineering, who issued a "still-famous" memo, which stated, bluntly (and paraphrased): "Thou shalt use Web services," and "If you don't use Web services, you'll get fired."
While Erickson doubts such extreme punishment would have occurred, it very effectively got the message through to AT&T's far-flung development departments. "There's no substitute for strong executive support," he said. "There was a sea change after that memo."
Another sea change took place when Erickson's team recognized that it was not being effective in promoting SOA adoption, because they were meeting with departments too late in the process -- close to their application test phase. "It was already baked," he recounted. "We began meeting with them at design time instead. Before that, SOA was just a middleware strategy."
As described by BEA's Bret Dixon in the follow-up keynote, there has been a change in tone over the past year when it comes to SOA: "We're not seeing people debating whether to go with SOA or not -- we're now seeing people go full force into it."
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