Strategic SOA ‘outpacing tactical Web services for ROI’

This article by Rich Seeley, who interviewed me for the article, appeared in Tech Target yesterday discussing the results of that Aberdeen survey I discussed, both on my blog and Podcast.

“Organizations investing in a ‘full SOA infrastructure,’ reported better results in terms of lower application development and maintenance costs and high end user satisfaction, than those doing tactical Web services, according to the Aberdeen survey. The report, ‘SOA Middleware Takes the Lead: Picking Up Where Web Services Leaves Off,” covered results of a worldwide survey of 150 organizations and concluded that investment in enterprise service bus products, as well as registries and repositories pays off.”

The fact of the matter is that SOA is something you do, not something you buy. Thus, when thinking about SOA a long term strategic plan is best, albeit few seem to be chasing the strategic value of SOA just yet.

“Linthicum, who emphasizes the importance of taking a strategic approach to SOA with detailed planning prior to any product purchases, said he believes the vendors in the space would do well to follow a more strategic approach. In fact, he believes they could actually sell more products that way.

‘I agree with Aberdeen that you need to have middleware technology to be successful with SOA,’ Linthicum said. ‘However, I’m not sure there’s a direct correlation with what you spend and the success. The direct correlation is how much planning work is done before you select a technology, and select the right technology, not just buy technology.'”

Clearly, everyone I still thinking technology first, and strategy second, and that just won’t scale. Thus, you’ll find that there will be two major mistakes being made: Those that stand up JBOWS, and call it an SOA. Or, those that purchase a ton of technology, before understanding their own issues, and call that successful. Both approaches will be expensive, and will require a lot of additional work to find the value.