Business Transformation in Action

Forrester Research just issued a new report on the state of SOA, and suffice to say the analyst firm is quote bullish on SOA's prospects. Actually, while catchy, the title -- "SOA Is Far From Dead -- But It Should Be Buried" -- does not do justice to the compelling case made for SOA within.

Randy Heffner, author of the study (who has also made numerous appearances here for ebizQ SOA events), observes that "no prior industry initiative for IT architecture has had an impact as positive and broad reaching as service-oriented architecture." In fact, a sizeable number of respondents, 30%, appear to see SOA for all it can be -- a vehicle for strategic business transformation.

It's also notable all the other types of initiatives for which SOA paves the way. Randy points to five major transformative ventures that probably wouldn't make it without SOA at the foundation:

Legacy application modernization. "You may have a mess of overlapping, duplicate, and hard-to-use siloed applications, but SOA provides a strong model for unifying across the silos and providing access to the still important and relevant business functions buried within those applications."

Dynamic business applications. "SOA is a key enabler for a new style of application that brings together the transactions, content, analytics, processes, and collaboration that users need to do their work."

Business activity monitoring (BAM). "SOA and Web services management solutions can siphon off business transaction data and feed it to BAM infrastructure to provide immediate and direct insight into business operations."

Event processing. "Complex event processing (CEP) engines can automatically resolve business situations by invoking one of your business services."

Business process management (BPM). "At various steps in the process, SOA-based business services encapsulate the work to be done, making it easier to refine, reorganize, and restructure business processes in a modular fashion."

Embedded, unified communications. "SOA provides the means of packaging
and integrating both business services and human collaboration into a seamless, monitored, optimizable business process flow."