Though there's some excitement around service oriented architecture (SOA), with all major vendors peddling their offerings, its adoption in India is still in its infancy. However, marketers are hopeful of creating adequate demand for SOA products and services, as the architecture is supposed to deliver direct business benefits to enterprises. But are the enterprises ready to adopt this new architecture? “As new technologies emerge and networks become more pervasive, enterprises will have an increasing opportunity to deploy new applications and IT solutions that can help them improve network operations and business results,” says Ranajoy Punja, VP Marketing for Cisco Systems. “To gain competitive advantage, companies need to control the costs of operating and managing their IT systems so that they could free resources for development and deployment of new applications that could help the business,” he adds.

On the Mark
Most enterprises increasingly explore tech solutions to help them trim assets, workers, and costs to become more agile in the gory marketplace. It's this enterprise craving that the marketers want to address by positioning their SOA wares for the cost-conscious customers. “Increasing cost of maintaining, integrating applications and competition will force enterprises to adopt SOA in order to be more agile and responsive,” asserts Dhruv Singhal, head, Professional Services, BEA Systems.

It's also believed that shrinking IT budgets will force companies to try solutions like SOA for creating efficient application platforms. “SOA adoption is unavoidable,” declares Subbu Subramanian, director, Solutions Architecture, Tavant Technologies. “In communications systems, for example, by formally embracing a SOA approach, solutions are better positioned to stress the importance of well-defined, highly interoperable interfaces. This should greatly decrease integration costs and allow for much more dynamic solutions to be deployed.” So more companies will be interested in having SOA simply to conserve development and deployment costs while achieving higher quality levels. “With SOA, organizations get the ability to distribute development and yet commit to quality software,” says Akila Krishnakumar, CEO, Offshore Services Division, SunGard. “They also save time and effort to analyze the impact of change.”

The low-cost software development model around SOA provides a greater attraction for companies to embrace this architecture. “Better flexibility and extensibility at low cost through reusable, self-contained software modules will help users accept SOA,” says Susanta Mishra, senior project manager, PSI Data Systems. Mishra also believes that unification of business and IT through flexible business processes, and ability for software across organizations and network boundaries to collaborate securely are among the positive factors for SOA market growth.

Another factor that will spur the SOA growth is increasing Web-based business, which demands higher levels of security and reliability. For this, SOA seems to be a viable alternative, as it is based on a standards-approach essential for interoperability among heterogeneous platforms. “The need for development of standards for Web services transaction, security, management, reliability, and availability of stable products that implement these standards will spur the adoption of SOA by enterprises,” hopes Dilip Dhanuka, vice president, Products and Technology Group, Patni.

Possible Hiccups
However, despite the apparent promise that SOA is showing, all may not be hunky-dory for the market development. Vendors are apprehensive, thinking that it may be difficult for enterprises to adopt SOA because it involves unconventional buying and deployment approach. “SOA requires change in the way applications are designed and developed. In SOA, the enterprise-wide benefits outweigh the benefits at the application level. As funding is often at the application level, this will require a change in which costs and benefits of applications/services are allocated and measured,” says Singhal. “Also, SOA involves three years for enterprise-wide deployment, which requires a dedicated effort by all the parties involved in the implementation.” That means user organizations need to act with patience and those who want instant results may not gain from SOA use. Moreover, it'll be difficult for enterprises to calculate return on investment (RoI) in the case of SOA. “The ROI model for SOA is not a rigorous one. It's currently an art than a science,” says Subramanian.

There are other concerns, too. For example, the conflicting industry views on standards could hamper the SOA strides in the enterprise sector. “If vendors participating in the standards setting committees don't collaborate with each other, and instead try developing parallel sets of standards, then the progress of standards development will slow down,” says Dhanuka. Security is another aspect that could slow down the SOA market. “Shared business service could introduce additional risk of security for critical applications,” says Mishra.

While every new technology comes loaded with divided opinions, vendors need to be ready to confront the market challenges. Their success or failure will be largely determined by market forces. And in the case of SOA, which is in its embryonic state, it'll be too early to predict the direction of market movement.

Rakesh Raman
The author is an independent technology journalist.
rakeshra@cybermedia.co.in

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