System Integration Drives SOA Deployment
Benefits include cost savings, improved maintenance and faster, easier upgrades
New York, NY – Mar. 18, 2008 – Integration, whether among internal systems or of internal systems with those of partners, suppliers or service providers, is the major factor driving enterprises to deploy service-oriented architectures (SOA) according to Nemertes Research latest benchmark, “Services-Oriented Architectures and Applications.” The study, based on two months of in-depth interviews with more than 52 IT executives at 50 companies, found that the closely linked issues of integration, complexity, consolidation and resilience accounted for nearly 40% of the reasons given for adopting SOA.
IT executives are exploiting key features of SOA – loose coupling among components, interface-drive interaction – to mask some of the complexity of their current infrastructures and to make it faster and easier to add or replace components without causing disruptions. In simplifying their approach to bringing together a large number of interacting and interdependent systems reliably, they improve increase the resilience of their services. This improvement in integration drives cost savings both up front, with integrating new systems more quickly, and over time, by making maintenance and upgrades faster, easier and safer.
Agility and flexibility are the key business drivers for SOA adoption. Thirty percent of IT-executive participants cited issues of agility and flexibility as driving their SOA adoption. “Agility – doing new things quickly – is ultimately about IT aligning itself with business goals,” says John Burke, principal research analyst with Nemertes Research. “Flexibility is closely related to agility, capturing the ideal not just of redirecting effort, but also of stretching to cover a wider range of services or functions.” Faster integration of new systems and more reliable integration of systems overall are key enablers of agility and flexibility.
Reduction of development efforts through code reuse—the desire to stop reinventing wheels—accounted for 16% of IT executives’ reasons for deploying SOA. Reusing code someone else has already written, tested and debugged is attractive because of time saved in the short term, and because of the consistency created by standardization through reuse in the long run. Lastly, preparing for the future, rounds out the reasons IT executes cited for SOA adoption. “Companies are interested in preparing to meet the challenges of new IT systems as they add or replace existing systems,” says Burke.
About the Benchmark
The four-volume benchmark, Services-Oriented Architectures and Applications, examines several key areas, including organizational and operational trends, governance and architecture, vendor adoption and technologies, and the enterprise cost model around SOA. This research is based on discussions with 52 IT executives at companies of various size and focus.
About Nemertes Research
Nemertes Research is a research-advisory firm that specializes in assessing the business value of emerging technologies. You can learn more about Nemertes Research at our website www.nemertes.com.
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For more information, contact:
Karen Wucher Nemertes Research
Phone: 972.335.7028
Cell: 972.872.0828
Karen.Wucher@nemertes.com