Services oriented architecture is coming of age

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 10/24/2005

Services oriented architecture, or SOA, is gaining ground in IT departments, especially in the high tech manufacturing and consumer packaged goods industries.

That’s the result of a recent survey of 1,300 Global 2000 companies by WebMethods Inc., (703-460-2500). More than a third of the companies, 480, responded to the survey.

“Eighty percent of the respondents said that they were deploying services oriented architecture and web services in their operations today,” says Rick Clements, director of strategic marketing for WebMethods. “Half were employing 10,000 transactions per month and 6% were doing up to 1 million web services transactions per month.”

“What that says to us is that SOA is real,” Clements adds.

SOA has been one of the hottest, and least understood, topics in technology over the last several years. Big enterprise players like SAP (610-661-1000) and Oracle (866-672-2531) have created logistics platforms to take advantage of services oriented architecture. So have systems integrators like WebMethods.

Simply put, SOA is an IT platform that enables the integration of applications and functionality from a variety of vendors. Web services describes the method of delivering those applications to users.

The architecture allows users to build their business solutions from parts – using just the functionality they need – that are architected to plug into an SOA platform. For instance, instead of implementing an entire warehouse management system on top of an ERP system, a user may plug in just the components they need for their operations, like labor management and compliance labeling.

Once those solutions have been created, they can easily be re-used in new facilities or for new processes. “Instead of creating a new solution for every facility, SOA allows you to re-use a solution over and over again and to do it quickly,” says Clements.

It’s no surprise that those benefits topped the list users gave as their primary purposes for pursuing an SOA strategy:

• Ability to reuse services in the future:20.4%
• Lower integration costs:17.6%
• Faster delivery of projects:16.2%

The number one inhibitor to deploying SOA: Nearly 17% of respondents said it was lack of knowledge of SOA within their enterprise.

“There are users out there deriving real results using SOA and web services,” says Clements, “but there’s also differences in maturity, with a lot of users at the beginning of the cycle.”