As far as SOA is concerned, the days of exploration, speculation, and tire-kicking are over. It's time to get down to business.
SOA implementations no longer focus on prototypes and proof of concept, says Accenture's David Nichols. Instead of seeking technology-centric solutions, companies are focused on addressing new capabilities or improving business processes.
I recently spoke to David to explore SOA ROI and other pertinent matters as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)
From David's' vantage point, the footprint of SOA projects is growing significantly. "One thing that we''ve noticed in the last 18 months or so is that our clients -- especially the early adopters -- have been rapidly evolving and increasing their SOA footprint," he relates. "Accenture's high performers IT research reveals some very, very interesting trends to us. About half of the clients and companies that we consider to be high performers are currently looking at implementing an SOA-based architecture within the next 12-18 months -- evolving away from the prototype and the proof of concepts into true SOA-based architectures."
And SOA is increasingly about getting down to business, in the literal sense. "The interesting thing about this is a lot of these clients are not looking for a better technology or technology-centric solution, they're focused on addressing new capabilities within their organization, or closing the gaps between some business processes that they may not be performing at the level that they would like them to perform," David says.
The goals of these SOA projects include "bringing products to market quicker, opening up new capabilities within their business, and being able to bring those to market a lot quicker and truly optimizing the way that they run their business."
As part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, InfoWorld, in cooperation with ebizQ, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry's top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.
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