January 2nd, 2007
Survey confirms we're getting faster and better at SOA
Last month, I wrapped up writing the latest Evans Data survey of Web services and SOA, in which more than 400 managers and developers were asked to document their progress with these approaches. The survey has been conducted twice a year since the end of 2003.
More than 40 percent of developers say they can complete an SOA project within three months – more than twice as many as a year ago.
The survey tackles Web services and SOA as two separate categories, recognizing that not all Web services projects are SOA, and vice versa.
On the SOA side, the survey found that 17% of companies say they have a functioning SOA in place, and another 26% plan to complete SOA projects over the coming year, for a total of 43%. This is up from 36% a year ago.
An interesting finding is that more than 40% of developers working on SOA can now complete a typical SOA project within three months – more than twice as many as a year ago. Plus, more than 60% of all SOA projects are now developed and deployed within just six months,the survey also finds.
Over the last two years, the total number of companies with more than 40 Web services in production has doubled, and that number is expected to double once again in the next twelve months.
We are getting faster and better with SOA, the survey shows. But what's behind this? First, there's simply a growing comfort level with SOA methodologies. Second, the products, platforms, and tools and the market keep on getting better. We now have tools that hide all the protocols and make the building-block approach to SOA more tenable, as well as enable automated governance.
The bad news is there are still plenty of obstacles to effective SOA deployments — especially from the business side of the house.
In fact, SOA and Web services deployments face different types of challenges. Determining return on investment for SOA is considered the number-one challenge to SOA development and deployment efforts, followed by getting organizational buy-in.
The obstacles to Web services alone, however, are technical in nature — lack of skilled development resources is the most oft-mentioned challenge for Web services efforts, followed by changing standards or a lack of standards, cost, and legacy integration.
What this tells us that IT shops simply are forging ahead with basic Web services work, which are part and parcel of day-to-day IT projects these days. However, SOA is a business-focused effort.
The dramatic productivity increases noted above come at the same time as developers and IT professionals embrace Microsoft’s .Net and Java for SOA in almost equal proportions, and both the Java and C# languages’ market share continue to grow as SOA implementations mushroom. Managed code, in fact, is becoming the wave of the future — three years from now, two out of three SOA developers will be running the majority of their applications in managed code.
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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