In its Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle 2005 Gartner has
identified service oriented architecture and web services as having
a huge future impact on business.
But most systems in the enterprise are incapable of taking
advantage of SOA, says integration company Wax Digital, and a more
selective approach should be adopted.
Steve Thompson, product development team architect at Wax Digital
said, "In 80% of the businesses we work with people transfer
information by producing files and shipping them around by FTP.
Engineering web services for such systems does not yet make
commercial sense, especially where, as is often the case, they are
likely to be replaced at some point.
"Most systems in use are years old and will never fit into the web
services universe. Mix and match is the only option for most, using
enterprise service bus and business process management software to
take data and transform it for use by other apps. It's best to
adopt a transitional approach with use of web services where
appropriate, especially in building new applications, but
leveraging simpler communications in many," he said.