SOA really can transform business, but the demands of doing it right are high. Will cloud-based services help? At InfoWorld’s 10th SOA Executive Forum, three things struck me: 1) SOA takes a long time if you do it right; 2) companies that have been doing SOA for a long time have no problem demonstrating dramatic business benefits; and 3) cloud-based services are closer than I thought to being integrated into customers’ SOA deployments. Two presenters represented companies that had been applying SOA principles for a decade or more: Maja Tibbling, lead enterprise architect for Con-Way, a freight transportation and logistics company; and Bill Chapman, CTO of the electronics distributor Avnet. Maja had participated in our SOA events before, but this time, she told the whole story of how, over time, Con-Way identified and created adaptable business services at the right level of granularity — and now uses them across the enterprise to rejigger and create new applications with a very quick time to market. That agility, she argued, was essential to the company’s ability to thrive, especially as it adjusts to soaring fuel costs. [ For in-depth coverage of SOA and its implications, check out our Real World SOA blog by David Linthicum, the keynote speaker for our 10th SOA event. ] Bill Chapman of Avnet uses service orientation inside and out. Inside the company, shared services were the best solution to integrating a number of companies acquired by Avnet. At the same time, when integrating with outside partners, Avnet needed to get beyond high-maintenance, point-to-point integration and use services instead. Bill estimated that SOA has reduced development times by 45 percent and increased order-to-quote efficiency by 30 percent. There were other shining success stories, but it’s also clear to me that some companies — generally for cultural or financial rather than technical reasons — will never be able to do SOA. Getting multiple company divisions to share anything is not easy, let alone vital services and the rule for creating and using them. Without a shared vision and sufficient commitment of resources, SOA withers on the vine. Enter cloud-based services. If you can rely on a provider in the cloud for at least some of your services, and those services are configurable enough, you may be able to cut out a lot of trial and error and initial development. At the SOA event, I spoke with a couple of vendors who are working on this, but no one wants to get into details or time frames yet. My feeling is that, faced with the largest financial crisis since the great depression, IT is likely to scale back its ambitious initiatives like SOA. Can cloud-based services fill in the gap? Not yet, but probably sometime soon. Technology Industry