Budgeting for SOA Success

I was a bit confused when this article, “Budgeting for SOA Success,” my article, posted on the Computer World site. Indeed I remember writing it, but I thought it was for InfoWorld. My bad, I’m sure. Truth-be-told I need to pay more attention to whom I’m sending articles to, good resolution for 2007 I’m thinking.

As confusing was the 11/01/2007 14:03:51 post date on the article. Somebody forgot the reset the time on the server, or my future self is writing and posting articles…now that would be cool. I would have less hair, but more information.

Joe McKendrick had some good insights into my article. I urge you to read his thoughts, and that’s actually how I saw that the article had posted in the first place.

The purpose of the article was to provide a prediction as to how enterprises would spend their hard-earned budgets on SOA in 2007.

A few tidbits:

“2007, however, will witness a significant surge in SOA spending, as early adopters evolve POC (proof of concept) implementations into more robust deployments and late adopters buy into the architectural shift. Lack of insight and foresight, however, will spur many enterprises to divert too many dollars to areas that will prove less fruitful in ensuring the long-term success of their SOA.”

I’m specially speaking about the hype issue, and the fact that far too much time is spent on looking at the emerging technology, and not enough time on looking at your own architectural issues. One of the great things about SOA is that it provides you with an opportunity to evaluate your own status, and provides a great excuse to fix it.

To that end…

…”too much will be spent on hype — again. Many who should be heads-down in their own requirements will get caught playing ‘follow the buzzword’ or ‘manage by magazine.’ This means excesses for steering committees, conferences, and POCs to the detriment of real work getting done.”

I know I sound like a broken record, but SOA is hard when you get right down to it. It’s complex distributed computing and requires some basic architectural changes…many that have roots in traditional enterprises architecture and require much the same discipline.

However, there is plenty of new and innovative stuff to go around, indeed…

…”few companies will spend enough examining the emerging Web, specifically SaaS (software as a service) and Web services marketplaces. Many enterprise apps can be outsourced, either to SaaS providers accessible through the Web or as sets of services that may be abstracted directly into your SOA. Indeed, of all the aspects to budget for, tapping the emerging Web could provide the highest ROI. Position your SOA to bank on it.”

One of the byproducts of a SOA, is the ability to work and play well with the emerging Web, including SaaS delivered applications and services. These are money-in-the-bank for many enterprises; you just need to plan to take advantage of them.