Crossfire

‘‘Don't talk pure technology with the management to sell SOA’’

What makes an organization successful in their adoption of SOA? Atul Saini, CEO & CTO, Fiorano Software talked to Rajendra Chaudhary on why SOA requires CIO leadership for success

SOA still appears to be as esoteric and academic as ever. Why haven't we witnessed the kind of SOA adoption as we'd anticipated?

It doesn't have to be as complex as and as academic as suggested by the so called 'experts'. It can be a lot simpler and doesn't need to be really expensive. The pundits who label SOA as a exhaustive and expensive exercise often don't understand the value that it offers to user organizations. I think this is one of the reasons why we haven't witnessed traction in SOA adoption. There is a great deal of confusion that's been created by the experts who prescribe a million things for the user organizations. As a result the CIOs and more so the managements often don't see the business benefits of 'SOAization'. Additionally CIOs themselves haven't really been able to articulate the business value of SOA either. This is partly because sometimes the benefits of SOA aren't as direct as in case of other IT implementations.

For instance an ERP implementation might result in better operational efficiency, a CRM might result in better customer engagements but the benefits of an SOA exercise aren't quite as in-your-face. If you want to change some business rules and bring in some new processes, SOA helps you to that much more easily by inducing greater flexibility into the system. Now you don't need to spend hefty sums and countless man-hours on programming because the system is far more adaptable as a result of SOA. But this is an attribute that isn't as conspicuous as perhaps some of the others.

How does a CIO actually get the buy-in from the management and other key stakeholders in the organization for a SOA project?

I think the CIO needs to explain SOA to the CEO and the management in laymen's terms. It can't hurt if he tries to sell it as a cost cutting measure or something that could save time and effort on the user's part. For example, at one of India's leading spirit companies, they managed to reduce the time taken for invoicing from an average 12 minutes to around 2 minutes using our SOA technology. The management 'gets' the message when they are shown results like these. But if you go up to them and start talking about SOAP, XML and WSDL you are more likely to alienate them than get their buy-in.

You've recently begun looking at the Indian market more seriously and exploring opportunities here. How optimistic are you about your chances?

I'm very optimistic about the market opportunities here in India. We only began looking at the Indian market seriously around 6-7 months back. We didn't come to India earlier because of a couple of reasons. First, we wanted to focus on the global market and grow our business in the more mature markets such as the US and UK. Secondly, organizations here weren't quite ready as yet. The need for something like SOA wasn't felt as strongly by the Indian companies then as it is now.

Also, organizations here seemed to be a little brand conscious, meaning they would only talk to the larger vendors as opposed to niche players such as us. But now fortunately things are starting to change gradually. It has become easier for us to speak to potential customers (our success in the global market doesn't hurt either). We have identified some key verticals including manufacturing, banking & finance, and energy and will focus on them aggressively in the days ahead. Based on our initial experience, I can safely say that India will be a very important market for us going forward.

rajendra.c@expressindia.com