IT consulting firm Accenture has been one of the frontrunners in making the big push for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) way before it gained mindshare in the industry. Last year, the company made a bold step to commit $450 million over the next three years into its SOA practice. The efforts seem to be paying off now. More than 300 SOA projects are currently underway at the company. David Nichols, partner and global lead for SOA at Accenture spoke to Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News on the company's plans in this area, the enterprise traction for SOA and future plans.

CyberMedia News: Last year Accenture announced a $450 million investment towards SoA. Could you tell us about the investment spread?

David Nichols: The spread is across three primary areas. Firstly to transform Accenture's internal capabilities around SOA in terms of training for core practitioners and building delivery assets. The second area is in R&D and the last is in building industry specific solutions. We are building tools and delivery assets that help us deliver better to clients. We are building industry specific solutions on SOA- based platforms across all our five operating groups. There are 18 sub-groups totally and we are building specific solutions for the verticals. Some of the investment has also gone into setting up the Accenture Innovation Center for Sun Microsystems in Bangalore that will focus on SOA and identity management solutions.

CMN: SOA has been talked about a lot for the last few years. Do you think it is past the hype and has it reached the inflection point where enterprises are actually looking at serious implementations?

David Nichols: For us, it has happened already. Around this time last year, we had a more narrow group of customers asking for SOA strategy, road map, assessment, prototype and demo kind of projects. Those same customers have now matured to a point where they are doing full-blown solutions around SOA implementations, not just for integration but moving on to other business layers around SOA. They are not just looking at pure technology specific solutions but really the breadth of components of SOA. People who are a little late in the game are doing serious investigation on what they have to do. We have already passed the point where we have had to pull an audience in order to have them listen to what we have to say on SOA. It is showing up in a lot of Request for Proposals (RFP) where clients are asking about our capabilities around SOA.

Data from our high performance IT research that is conducted internally supports what we are seeing in the market place. Clients are using SOA for better integration but also for other things. The graph is changing and they are seeing the value beyond the technology aspects of SOA. Also, the number of clients in the early stages of initial investment has vastly gone up as well. A lot of this is attributed to success stories of enterprises in SOA.

CMN: Accenture has large practices with enterprise vendors like SAP and Oracle. How does your SOA practice fit in with the other practices?

David Nichols: In the last 10-15 years, the industry was application-focused. Then in the late 80s and early 90s, the business process reengineering wave happened followed by the applications wave. Now we are seeing the movement go back the other way. Instead of running the business on a collection of applications, companies are going to base their business on collection of business processes. They will support their processes with services.

Vendors like Oracle and SAP are re-architecting their products to support business processes. It has become the center point on how businesses address their challenges since it gives data in an automated fashion. Now they can optimize the relevant business process versus buying applications off the shelf.

We have substantial business in SAP and Oracle and also have innovation centers on their technology platforms. One of the reasons why they (SAP and Oracle) are having such a big push for their Fusion and NetWeaver platforms is that they understand the movement for standards and optimization of business processes that customers want.

Besides our delivery centers across the world, We work on SOA specific work at the SAP NetWeaver center at the SAP headquarters in Waldorf, Germany and also on Oracle Fusion at Redwood Shores at the Oracle headquarters in California, USA.

CMN: Would SOA pose a threat in future to traditional packaged enterprise application vendors?

David Nichols: I think they would in the historical sense. The big package vendors know that open standards and systems and services are the way of the future. They are taking a very new approach at making functionality availability in the future. These companies are evolving their business model and products to embrace new technology. SOA has changed the game and landscape. They have been open and honest about why they are making adjustments. Both SAP NetWeaver and Oracle Fusion are are set on SOA. They are including more open components into these.

CMN: What kind of industry specific SOA solutions have you built?

David Nichols: There are a couple of solutions that we have built. One is the Accenture communication. Platform that is part of the high-tech operating group. This is built on an SOA based platform, and the design was done in different geographical locations. Another is a banking asset. My group is now working on an Accenture business process repository, which will be populated, with different processes. As and when they identify new assets, and service offerings in specific industry verticals, they will start with the processes and then build solutions on top of that.

CMN: How much of Open Source is coming into SOA?

David Nichols: One of the findings of our internal survey is that a lot of clients have some bit of Open Source in varying degrees of usage. It is in the infrastructure and software layer of NetWeaver. Almost everyone is working in that space and it is growing. Open Source is a part of the technology architecture stack in SOA. We look at the popular mainstream components at the Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) level and at the infrastructure level.