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The SOA story

The adoption Of SOA among Indian enterprises and its impact By Asheesh Raina

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style for applications that exhibit five definitional characteristics: They're modular; The modules can be distributed across multiple computers; Software developers have written or generated interface metadata that specifies explicit contracts, so that other developers can find and use the services; Service interfaces are separate from the implementations (code and data) of the service provider components; and Services can be shared (that is, they can be invoked successively in disparate consumer applications serving different business purposes).

Here we talk about SOA position from an Indian perspective. India-based vendors and system integrators have been positioning SOA as part of their products and service offerings to gain greater openness and mind share in the domestic market. However, SOA continues to lose its initial hype as organizations grapple with approaches and implementation issues. One of the major issues is the trade-off between creating a simple service layer to access legacy applications versus investment in a ‘big bang’ program that requires a complete rewrite of applications to be SOA-compliant. More and more India organizations are exploring the consequences of using it or skipping it.

In one Gartner survey we realized that Indian organizations have high level of familiarization when compared to their Asian counterparts; but adoption had been fairly low.

Vendor's lack of ability to quantify ROI in a more standard way and failure to articulate the value preposition of services reuse to cost sensitive Indian organizations are few main reasons for its low traction. The economic slowdown, too, had dampened the initial enthusiasm surrounding the technology; as organizations faced budget cuts and many deferred their IT modernization plans.

However time based maturity could not elude the mindset of Indian enterprise, thus organizations no longer recognized SOA as a great differentiator but something which is a must have. Also slowly they have turned their attention towards SOA governance as well.

However mainstream adoption of SOA is expected to take two to four years—a lot will depend on vendors' ability to demonstrate compelling ROI prepositions for SOA through improved efficiency, agility and end customer experiences.

Indian organizations should consider SOA as key foundation for future development and for attaining business agility. Though lack of maturity and skills is still a major cause of worry among enterprises in India, the shortfall is increasingly being addressed by the vendor ecosystem, offering extensive and credible services on SOA training and project support. Indian organizations should consider long-term technical and business support contracts when negotiating with the vendors. Training and knowledge-based assets, such as frameworks and white papers, should be made key vendor-evaluation criteria.

SOA will affect all enterprises that deploy IT systems. Organizations looking for innovative and faster ways to develop and deliver products will benefit from using SOA. SOA will also transform how organizations conduct business, especially in terms of being agile to address changing business requirements. This may also lead to the emergence of captive centers of excellence in India, initially for SOA governance and later for other associated technologies.

About the author: By Asheesh Raina is a Principal Research Analyst with Gartner