There has been talk of companies scaling back on SOA efforts as part of IT budget cuts.
Exactly the wrong thing to do, say some experts. SOA is a strategy that helps businesses navigate this special period of recovery and renewal.
Sandy Carter, IBM vice president for SOA, BPM and WebSphere Marketing, recently discussed these points at the recent IBM Virtual Global SOA Forum, "Work Smarter, Take Out Costs In a Tough Economy." (Full transcript of Carter's talk available here.)
Agility is the key to businesses not only surviving, but thriving, Sandy explains. SOA helps achieve this first through optimization, since 76% of IT
budgets are spent on maintenance. SOA allows "you and helping you to reduce the
maintenance and management of your existing IT applications. We can cut
costs over time, enabling you to spend money therefore on these
business-driven uses of IT, that can help the overall business grow in
its competitiveness and usefulness across the board. Makes it more
competitive again. Not just to survive, but to thrive."
It's all about increasing revenues -- not just cutting costs. In fact, if you focus only on cost-cutting, the business will lose to competitors, says James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk. (Full transcript of James' talk here.)
"In this difficult business environment, clearly we need to cut costs.
But you know what? Nothing is sustainable if you're not driving new
revenue streams, if you're not able to get new customers," James says.
"Very clearly, from SOA, you're able to reach out to new customer
sets." For example, being able to extend internal applications to
customer and partner-facing Websites is a solid strategy for new
growth. SOA will help leverage internal applications -- whether they're
on mainframes or Windows boxes -- for this next round of growth.
There will be plenty of expert observations on SOA at IBM's upcoming "IMPACT" conference, to be held May 3-8 in Las Vegas.
The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
Joe, you make an important point here – agility is the key to a thriving business. SOA’s ability to help business navigate through our current economic environment depends on a couple key areas:
1. Truly understanding and valuing those service assets that currently reside in your application portfolio
2. “Getting the word out” to your business and developer community about the possibilities around leveraging those assets – how are your developers focusing on leverage? Is asset visibility bringing sufficient awareness to new customer opportunities?
3. And finally, drive home the valuation story by keeping track of key SOA metrics around Return on Asset valuation – how much value are you deriving from each of your assets within your portfolio?
Kleber Bacili
CTO and Founder
Sensedia
Kleber: Thanks for these observations. If implemented properly, and with business support, SOA provides enormous streamlining opportunities.
SOA itself must evolve or be "dead"...
but yes, SOA principles are even more critical in these times to avoid "rip, replace, displace, destroy" as the model for cost consolidation.
Cost consolidation must be achieved through non-violent means and SOA Adoption done right is the right way to do this.
Miko