There's been a lot of debate across the industry as to whether SOA works best when rolled out through smaller, targeted projects, or as part of a broader enterprise effort.
For Pat Walsh, VP of marketing for IONA, there's no question as to which approach delivers the best results -- SOA is strongest when you start small and scale fast. I recently spoke to Pat on where SOA ROI is being seen as part of our podcast series connected to the recent InfoWorld Executive Forum. (Download podcast file here.)
A small, manageable project can demonstrate how SOA principles reduce time to market, building support for a larger implementation. After scaling SOA throughout the organization, companies see reduced time to market and greater efficiency through service reuse. Don't "boil the ocean for building out SOA within the organization," Pat advised. "Start with something that is manageable. And demonstrate how SOA principles can affect time to market of that little project and see the direct benefits that it provides to the business."
"What tends to happen then is that you get great support from both IT and the business and then you can scale out the overall SOA solutions that you have."
Pat points to one particular customer in the telecom space that followed this principle. "They now have a dominant position," he explains. "They reused systems that they had used for plain old telephone service and for high-speed IP connectivity amongst their corporate clients and repositioned those services to create a voice-over-IP solution."
In addition to greater scalability, Walsh says IONA's customers are seeing ROI from SOA in both hard and soft kinds of costs. SOA implementations reduce the need for large outlays of hardware and software stacks and also enable greater leveraging of existing resources, meaning greater success rates and faster completion times for business projects.
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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