Jon Brodkin, writing in JavaWorld, recently posted some answers to the six "burning" questions that stick in people's minds when they think about SOA.
1. Is anyone saving (or making money) using SOA? Good one. The challenge is that SOA costs up front, but delivers savings/ROI later. How much? Jon quotes Ashok Kumar of Avis Budget Group, who says the company has shaved the cost of bringing aboard a new partner from $50,000 to about $4,000, because the time it takes to put a new partner in the system was cut from a month to a day.
2. Why is it so hard to find employees with SOA expertise? I like this quote from Forrester's Larry Fulton: One client told him "the best method for identifying architects is to put a group of 10 developers to work, monitor them for 10 years and then decide who the architect is."
Training, training, training is the best approach to bringing not only IT people, but also businesspeople up to speed on that SOA can offer. Avis' Kumar cautions that SOA requires a different mind-set than traditional approaches to
building an IT infrastructure -- many people can program in Java and understand how to make a single Web service, but putting it all together in a services-oriented architecture is difficult.
3. Has Microsoft gotten a clue about SOA? Another great question. Forrester's Fulton and Judith Hurwitz say yes, and I agree. Heck, they even call BizTalk an enterprise service bus.
4. How does SOA affect network performance and management? The answer is Big Time. You can't predict how many people will use a service at a particular time. That's why SOA managers need to pay close attention to network and performance metrics. And, as the article notes, "since each application in a SOA is composed of many individual software components, a failure anywhere in the network can bring down an application. Your own performance in monitoring the network and immediately responding to problems is thus even more important after an SOA is deployed."
5. Do security requirements change when an IT department uses SOA? Big Time on this as well. Identity management is a big concern. Plus, there's lots more components to manage.
6. What are SOA's dark sides? Another great question. As the article puts it, "Security is clearly posing a challenge to at least some IT executives deploying SOA, but it?s not the only dark side you'll find when building a service-oriented architecture. One of the 'dark underbellies' of SOA is the challenge of providing a unified view of data and access to data across multiple business services."
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