You would think that a large vendor that sells SOA solutions would have no issues implementing said solutions across their own enterprises. But, alas, getting employees to eat your own dogfood is just as challenging as selling solutions on the open market.
Rich Seeley provides this account of SOA implementation at Sun Microsystems -- in which the vendor's SOA team had to sell the concept to its business users.
Sound familiar?
"It's hard to go sell SOA within the company," said Mike Ricigliano, senior manager for integration services
at Sun. "People go, 'Well isn't this just another reuse. Where's the hard ROI here?'"
Again, sound familiar?
Plus, Ricigliano found that when he went in and talked about SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL, business end-users' eyes would glaze over -- even they were Sun Microsystems business end-users. "It's very hard to connect the dots for people and show them the real value of SOA," he said. "It was all very theoretical. We'd say, 'Hey we're decoupling these systems from each other. It'll be more flexible.' I don't know if they really got that. They could care less about the technology, unless they think it's going to get them something quicker."
Once again, sound familiar?
The way Ricigliano finally began to build support for Sun's SOA was by actually building business process demos, employing services such as credit checks. Showing tangible examples of SOA in Action got the ball rolling at Sun. "The end users get that entirely," he said.
Perhaps Sun and other vendors eating their own dogfood will be able to leverage some of this understanding to help their customers better sell the benefits of SOA within their organizations. When vendors themselves have issues selling SOA to their own business users, you know its no cakewalk at non-technical companies.
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