SOA in Action Blog

"Someone told me there was a recession. I decided not to participate."
-Sam Walton

ebizQ colleague Brenda Michelson just posted excerpts from an interview with business author Jim Collins, who said downtimes are the best times for innovative and entrepreneurial companies. He observes how Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were able to bring in some of the best engineering talent on the market during a post-World War II slowdown.

And, I should add here, let's not forget that Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in April 1975, a dismal time when unemployment was hitting 10%.

The same goes for SOA proponents. There probably has never been a better time to advance the cause of service orientation in organizations.  Call it "Shovel-Ready SOA" that can act as as a nice, long-lasting, low-cost stimulus for business.

Consider these stimulating advantages:

• Help businesses achieve economies of scale: Organizations have a wealth of assets and resources they could tap into, if only they could. SOA can help surface these resources for new uses across the business.
• Help organizations expand or contract pieces of the business, as needed, without fuss and muss. Technology resources can quickly be pointed to business units or products that are seeing spikes in growth.
• Increase confidence through greater transparency of applications and data, especially at a time when markets have been quaking from fear of what they don't know;
• Help businesses collaborate better through more rapid integration: This is a time when organizations are re-evaluating, breaking down and reconstituting processes, or going through mergers.
• Enable new approaches such as business activity monitoring (BAM): BAM gives companies "an ear, an intelligence or data aggregator. But what we need is a real-time intelligence that's the process that are executing so that it can react faster in this economic downturn," said Mohan Udyavar, lead architect with Wipro Technologies, a participant in the session. "SOA fits in very well in addressing these concerns." 
• Make it easier for companies to break into new markets: "If they're going into the emerging markets, they don't want to start out their business processes from scratch," Udyava explains. "They want to have some shrink-wrap business processes and then 'plug in' the local business services so that they can quickly operate in this new market. They don't want to spend a lot of money on that and that's again the strength of a SOA implementation."

 As observed by Maneesh Joshi, senior group manager for product marketing at Oracle, at an Webinar that was part of ebizQ's latest SOA in Action conference, strong companies have used tumultuous times to get stronger, and be well positioned for the next economic boom. He cited a McKinsey study of more than 1,000 companies from the period of 1982 to 1999. "What they found were the companies that emerged, as leaders out of recession were the ones who had invested the most in their infrastructure during the recessionary period.  So instead of just holding cash and cutting down cost, they were actually innovating - they were actually investing in the infrastructure and getting themselves for the boom times."

This advantage is tied back to wisely investing in IT, and particularly SOA, Joshi relates.