Firms are struggling to make a business case for service
oriented architectures, but with SAP and Oracle planning to build
their next-generation application suites on the technology, users
could be pushed into SOA adoption.
This view was highlighted at a Corporate IT Forum SOA workshop
earlier this month. Ollie Ross, research manager at the user group,
said, “The challenge [for users] is finding a hook to get immediate
business value.”
She said the benefits of SOA arise from the ability to reuse
code and apply existing work to other areas of the business.
The workshop heard that SOA was being over-complicated by too
many interrelated standards, which could lead to SOA users becoming
locked into a particular technology.
A report by Forrester Research said forthcoming changes to
Oracle and SAP applications would see features exposed via web
services and built using transaction management and workflow
patterns. Users of these products could no longer adopt a wait and
see approach to SOA and would need an SOA strategy, it said.
However, Ross said, “A lot of groundwork needs to be done in
order for IT directors to sell SOA into the business.”