Service-oriented architecture is a very popular concept, but with that popularity comes a price. Namely, finding people with the skills to help put SOA in place is a growing challenge.
Last year, ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer sounded warning bells about a looming enterprise architect "drought" which could derail many SOA efforts. He noted that there "is a significant demand in the marketplace for experienced SOA talent," and "a burgeoning of SOA consulting companies that offer kick-start approaches to SOA in which they supply the experienced architects and their customers supply the heavy-lift labor to implement the services."
Miko Matsumura, vice president of WebMethods, also has expressed concern that SOA movers and shakers in organizations may be too few and far between. That role is falling to what Miko calls "visionary architects," who can provide a "scalability of understanding" to drive the scalability of the system.
AMR Research has just issued a report that also warned that demand for SOA-skilled professionals is exceeding supply. As a result, consultants are jumping into the gap -- As reported in SearchSOA TechTarget, SOA given rise to a massive opportunity for consultants, the consultancy observes. This is much like the demand the way "Web consulting was at the end of the 1990s," writes Ian Finley, AMR research director.
However, not all service providers are comfortable with SOA quite yet. Interestingly, AMR noted that SOA consulting was not the most profitable route for software vendors, with the exception of IBM, which has a large SOA practice. Once a company begins to move toward SOA, this dynamic changes. "Once a company is comfortable with SOA as its standard approach, it often seeks to shift all project work over to SOA," Finley wrote in the report. "Given the shortage of SOA skills in a typical company and the difficulty training some traditional IT staff in the SOA approach, consulting firms are well positioned to reap a windfall of SOA projects the coming years."
The AMR report notes that this is "a sea change from what systems integrators and service providers has done in the past, such as integration between applications, implementation of ERP applications, along with IT planning and strategy work. All those things now are being converted over to SOA at customer request. In other words the customers are telling them we don't want to do things in the old way. We want to do this with the knowledge of SOA."
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