The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
By David S. Linthicum, CEO, Linthicum Group, LLC , 10/18/2007
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SOA vendors are racking their brains these days, trying to figure out how to sell in this emerging marketplace. For most of them, things don't seem to be going very well. At the heart of the issue is the fact that SOA is an architecture (hence the "A"), and not a class of technology. Rather than providing tools to help build a SOA, they are selling products that could be a SOA unto itself. . At the same time, the customer is pulling their hair out in total confusion.
SOA vendors are not bad people; they just need some education in the ways to
most effectively sell their products. While I'm sure that most think they are
doing a fine job, the sales statistics for many of these vendors is less than
stellar. Moreover, they are leaving a trail of confused customers and fragmented
marketplaces in their wake. These customers are my clients, so I guess I'm complaining
on their behalf, but I'm also offering some education.
To that end, here are 5 things that all SOA vendors should know at this point
if they plan to be successful in this emerging marketplace. Also included are
some details as to how vendors can evaluate their sales and marketing efforts,
and solve their problems before it's too late.
1. Make sure your product works.
Sounds like a simple thing, but many SOA vendors do not properly develop and
test their products, and thus many SOA products fail when they are put into
production, or even during proof-of-concept testing. At issue is the fact that,
with the sense of urgency around the emerging market, many vendors push their
products out the door too quickly. Thus, the products are "buggy,"
the customers discover that quickly, and your name is "mud." Your
reputation takes a hit, and you lose the deal as well.
Developing a product is not easy, but you should never let a SOA product--which
is typically built around infrastructure--out of the shop unless the product
is rock solid and ready for the problem domains of your customers. Testing can
take up to 50 percent of the development time and resources, when considering
the complex patterns that SOA products employ, and the heterogeneous environments
where they are deployed.
2. Make sure you know what SOA is.
This also sounds like a simple thing, but the fact of the matter is, most of
those who sell SOA technology don't understand the first thing about SOA. They
typically play "buzzword bingo," reciting terms such as "agility,"
"reuse," "loosely coupled," etc., and all the while they
do not understand anything about their customers' issues, and perhaps not even
about the content they provide.
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