Users Send SOA SOS

NEW YORK CITY -- IT managers are calling on vendors to cut through the hype surrounding Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and get down to helping them deploy the technology.

To review: A number of vendors, including big names such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP, Oracle, and BEA are currently pushing SOAs to the masses. (See Oracle Sets Sights on SOAs, SeeBeyond Sucked Into Sun, IBM Intros SOA , and BEA Looks to VOIP, SOA.) But at the IDC SOA Forum event here today, there was confusion about how best to deploy the technology, which encompasses middleware, application software, and legacy systems.

SOAs are supposed to let users run services in the form of application software across different computing environments -- a kind of platform of platforms.” An SOA theoretically brings some much-needed agility to businesses groaning under the strain of tightly coupled services and systems. But many users still need convincing.

”The biggest hurdle is separating the vendor fog from the technology,” said Jim Weythman, CTO of Integrasolv, a New Jersey-based software development firm and prospective SOA user. “It’s understanding what the essence is versus the glossy stuff.”

Tim Fisher, senior vice president of services firm RCG Technology, another New Jersey user, told Byte and Switch that his headache is a cultural one. “The biggest hurdle now is showing businesspeople the value of SOA,” he said. Vendors, he thinks, should do more to help IT execs “sell” the SOA concept to skeptical end users within their own organizations.“Getting the value across to the business side is the biggest challenge,” agreed an IT manager from the financial sector, who asked not to be named. “It would make it easier if the board heard the message both from the IT department and from the industry as well.” He suggests that vendors tailor SOA events to the likes of CFOs and CEOs.

But there's more to the SOA shortfall than misdirected marketing. The SOA is clearly still an emerging technology, and there have been concerns about both a lack of best practice models and standards for the Web services that underpin SOAs. (See SOAs: Approach With Caution, SOS for SOAs, and Burton Group Over Stumbling Blocks.)

In Web services management, for example, there are competing standards, such as Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) which is backed by the Oasis Consortium, including HP and Microsoft’s Web Services for Management (WS-Management) framework.

This kind of scenario is anathema to users. ”I want to see the standards issues thrashed out,” said Michael Lewis, IT architect at Bridgeport, Connecticut-based People’s Bank. “When vendors group around a single standard, I would be more likely to go with someone in that group.”

On another note, Lewis says storage is part of the SOA equation, but so far vendors in that space aren't bellying up to the bar. “If the storage vendors want to go true SOA then they need to work out compatibility with the various platforms that they connect to.”Undeterred, vendors at the event said that more and more users are turning to SOAs. Uday Kumaraswami, vice president of the enterprise applications practice at HP, told Byte and Switch that the vendor has racked up 22 paying customers since it launched SOA-based consulting services last summer. (See HP Expands SOA Services and System Vendors Sight SOA.)

HP has positioned itself as an integrator for SOA products from other vendors. It will tailor its services to specific industry sectors during the spring, according to Kumaraswami. These, he said, will be aimed at financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and the public sector.

IBM, which unlike HP, has middleware at the forefront of its SOA strategy, has racked up between 1,500 and 1,800 customers, according to Sandra Carter, vice-president of IBM’s WebSphere marketing team. (See IBM Intros SOAs.)

— James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

Organizations mentioned in this article: