Sandhya Sule, senior manager, Product and Technology Initiatives, Patni, points out that organizations grappling with complex integration problems have been forced to adopt “service-oriented integration” and have progressed from exposed Web services to having an “enterprise service bus” for flexible integration backbone. 

CIOL: What is the traction in the SOA business so far?
Sandhya Sule: Today, organizations are faced with challenges of keeping up with changing business and technology scenario. They are:
* Incorporating changes mandated by regulatory compliances;
* Expanding due to mergers and acquisitions;
* Extending their boundaries to include partners, suppliers, customers;
* Collaborating and trading information in real time to realize mutual and customer benefits; and
* Modernizing their IT assets periodically to save themselves from technology obsolescence

Organizations are struggling to get their business processes and applications quickly adjusted to these changes and to contain costs due to the changes. In order to stay competitive in the face of changing business environment, organizations need provisions for easy introduction of new business processes and application resources, facilities for streamlining information flow across the barriers laid down by organizations’ divisions, and their IT applications to be in an integration-ready format.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides an effective means to address these requirements. Gartner analysts predict that by 2008, 60 percent of enterprises will use SOA as their "guiding principle" when creating applications and processes. On the other hand, IDC forecasts that the worldwide spending on SOA-based external services will reach $8.6 billion in 2006, experiencing a 138 percent increase from $3.6 billion in 2005. IDC also projects that global SOA-based services spending will reach $33.8 billion by 2010.
 
CIOL: If you were to compare India with the global scene, how has been SOA's adoption rate?
SS: Almost all major international customers have adopted SOA architecture principles one way or the other. Organizations grappling with the complex integration problems have been forced to adopt “service-oriented integration” and have progressed from exposed Web services to having an “enterprise service bus” for flexible integration backbone. Large enterprises now realize that SOA needs to be considered across boundaries of the immediate domain (application, business unit, organization, vendors, partners, customers). This has led them to have organizational strategy for “enterprise architecture” largely driven by a “service-oriented enterprise” need. Having said this, there are SMEs who have adopted the principles of SOA within the closed bounds of their domain (as point solutions) and are waiting for cheaper and mature solutions to emerge.\
 
CIOL: Have you been witnessing actual implementations now?
SS: Yes, we can say that. This is also accelerated by major vendors such as IBM showcasing products that provide the necessary technology to move from the POC stage to production. Open source technology and products does need some catching up to do.

CIOL: Can you elaborate on the key business advantages derieved from an SOA setup?
SS: The complete adoption of SOA is possible only if organizations start looking at an enterprise architecture that is aligned with the business architecture, and is able to take care of:
* Changes mandated by regulatory compliances;
* Extending their boundaries to include partners, suppliers, customers;
* Collaborating and trading information in real time to realize mutual and customer benefits;
* Modernizing their IT assets periodically to save themselves from technology obsolescence.

This will intrinsically lead to a portfolio rationalization before the customers move to an enterprise architecture aligned with business. Currently, enterprises spend close to 70 percent of IT budget just in maintenance. Some amount of that can be released if the portfolio gets rationalized. A scalable and future-proof architecture will also optimize IT spend in all new projects. And, we have not even considered the business benefits of having an IT architecture that is aligned with business architecture.

SOA offers benefits to businesses such as:
* Business agility, as the changes in business requirements can be dynamically and quickly incorporated;
* Connected processes and applications, increasing visibility and manageability of processes and currency of information required for decision making; improved time to market the software and services over the integrated platform and ability to quickly launch novel services over the integrated backbone;
* Lowered cost of maintenance and management due to modular, reusable software components; lowered cost of development as commonly required services will be available on the Web; longevity of software as it can be used from any platform, even one not envisioned at the time of its creation; and
* Extending services reach to global market over the Web, including for services generated from legacy applications

CIOL: If you were to point out any challenges, what would those be?
SS: I'd like to highlight on:
Cost - Budgets for an enterprise wide initiative will not come easily;
Technology - Choice of technology in an evolving ecosystem. A seamless transition from the fragmented, tightly coupled IT portfolio to an agile portfolio will happen over several years. This means that organizations need to be able to meticulously identify the phases of adoption and plan so that the transition is less disruptive;
Process – SOA will inherently give returns if the processes are optimized, redundancy is removed and “automation” reaches the most productive levels. Getting this right will need businesses to work very closely with their IT folks; and
People – As in any new venture, there is always resistance to change. Especially if it involves sharing of knowledge. Governance will be a key aspect of any enterprise wide adoption.

SOA best practices are yet to emerge, so we won’t be able to comment in detail on this. Yet, we see that SOA will succeed if it gets an enterprise flavor, has good governance model and measurable business metrics defined well in advance of mere technology focused SOA adoption.