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Why CIOs Are Increasingly Adopting SOA

Added 22nd Jun 2009

Article Highlights

  • CIOs are now far more inclined on how they can bring in agility and it is SOA is underneath projects that either strive to bring in agility or re-engineer processes.
  • SOA adoption is accelerating
  • At a recent global study CIOs on had SOA as number two on their priority list, after security

Apparently the number of CIOs adopting SOA seems to be going down. Are CIOs losing interest in SOA?

Carter: Actually, the story is a little different than what it seems. CIOs are becoming more business focused. The most insightful thing I heard substantiated this, was at a roundtable of CIOs held quite recently. As they were introducing themselves, one of them said, "Hi, I am an investment banker who focuses on IT." I think we would see more of that where CIOs are focused on the business. This means they are concentrating on whatever their challenges are and initiating a service-oriented solution to mitigate the challenge. Here, interestingly they would not say that they have embarked upon an SOA project.

“We are seeing compelling reasons for people who want to adapt to change. If you define SOA as an enabler of process change, we are seeing its adoption accelerating.”

CIOs are now far more inclined on how they can bring in agility. Moreover as CEOs are increasingly looking to restructure their companies, CIOs are looking closely at process improvement or re-engineering. Guess what's underneath projects that either strive to bring in agility or re-engineer processes? It's SOA. Hence, CIOs are not claiming that they have deployed an SOA project. They would rather term it as, let's say, a supply chain project built on SOA or an SOA-enabled traffic management project.

Since an SOA project always seems to be 'work in progress', are CIOs beginning to look at SOA more with a piecemeal approach?

Carter: I agree that people are deploying SOA in a slightly different way now. I'll give you an anology: when I was in Europe, I used to buy groceries every day. In US, I used to buy groceries once a week. That was the way people used to adopt SOA. They would figure out the scope of whatever they would need to embark upon a full consulting project to transform their business, and would buy for 'the whole week'. Now what we are seeing is that people would want to lay out their entire scope, but they shop 'for the day'. For work in progress projects, it allows you to pick up day's worth of groceries and not be stuck with a week's worth of groceries unnecessarily. What we are seeing is not lack of implementation, but change in the way people used to buy and deploy SOA. And, accordingly we have changed our offerings too. It seems to be working, as our first quarter results were good as we saw about 18 percent of Y-o-Y growth.

The other thing we are seeing is that different business models are being employed to cut costs down. Cloud is one of them. We have also introduced a private cloud offering. It is an appliance called WebSphere CloudBurst. Just like a library, it allows you to check out a software license, use it and put it back. So, this appliance allows you to install WebSphere in a test environment, where you can install and configure the application based on patterns and best practices. Use the application for what you need it for in the test environment, and then put the licenses back.

  • Page 1 : Why CIOs Are Increasingly Adopting SOA
  • Page 2 : Did the economic slowdown slow the adoption of SOA down?