SOA Investments on The Rise, Yankee Says

A new survey by Yankee Group finds that enterprises are embracing service oriented architectures in their networks at a much swifter pace.

The report, “2004 U.S. Enterprise Web Service Survey,” surveyed 437
enterprises across the U.S from the manufacturing, financial services, healthcare and wireless sectors. Seventy-five percent of the decision-makers who responded said the company planned an investment in SOA over the next year.

Profit appeared to be the main motive. Yankee Group found that a significant majority of respondents hope to either recognize a profit or some return on investment in the next-generation architecture over the next 24 months.

Another 66 percent of adopters said SOA deployments would help drive more revenues within two years.

Of the organizations that have already implemented SOA, 79 percent said it enhances their ability to collaborate with external parties. Seventy-one percent said SOA reduced complexity in distributed environments and 59 said it helped to
lower development costs.

“Whereas people are motivated to create efficiencies and address security, the real benefits are around collaboration across the value chain outside
of the firewall,” said Philip Fersht, director of Yankee’s business applications group. “That’s something that really surprised us.”

According to Fersht, the next stage for the technology adoption is the
evolution into enterprise-wide SOA. “Over the next 24 months we see a real move toward ubiquitous integration with suppliers and customers,” he said.

The results also found that Microsoft’s dominant position in many enterprises puts it in position to capitalize on the shift. Sixty-four percent of the survey respondents said Microsoft was their primary provider of Web services software — a key adjunct of service oriented architecture.

Second place when to another dominant technology company: IBM , which was cited by 36 percent of respondents as a primary provider of SOA tools.

However, when asked about vendor capabilities and implementation skills, 81 percent gave Microsoft high marks while 78 percent glowed about IBM. Oracle was the third most popular with 69 percent of the group.

“It’s because Microsoft is so pervasive in company’s systems,” Fersht noted. “In general they are the number 1 provider and I think it will stay that way for a while longer.”

The stakes in the Web Services market are not exactly peanuts either.
A recent report by the Radicati Group indicated that the market for Web services technology is expected to be worth $6.2 billion by 2008.