What is the Cost?
The cost of Web services products and SOA implementation is included in the tools required for implementation. What organizations need to plan for is the operations cost of training people on new technologies and managing change in organizations.
This cost will get amortized in the long run as companies begin to adopt a shared-services model. Business units architect and expose a business solution as Web service to not only meet its own business objectives, but also to extend them to other internal units or external parties (service providers, customers) as a commercial shared service. The shared-services part of the organization can also partly fund the design and implementation of the SOA project.
“One of the top five global pharmaceutical companies in the world used a shared-services model. They have a central budget for the new services, which is being jointly funded by business users,” says Vikram Duvvoori, Global Head, Middleware and Integration Practice, HCL.
“The SOA project starts with cash that is freed from simplification measures (e.g., what projects will we stop, what elements can we consolidate, what standards can be implemented, etc.),” explains HP’s Schoenrock.
Some proponents of SOA measure the cost in terms of loss of value if companies don’t invest in SOA now. “All core business systems, all vertical applications, development methodologies, tools and processes are expected to change in the next two years to adopt SOA and Web services for core processes. The expense of not now will be loss of competitive value from an overall organization perspective,” says Schoenrock. “This is what has to be measured.”
Getting SOAked?
By Vinnie Mirchandani
It’s not too often that the interests of software tools, software applications and outsourcing providers converge on the same enticing market. But with SOA, the voices of TIBCO, SAP and Accenture are equally excited. Their combined excitement does not, however, bode well for end user customers. In fact, customers may be in for a SOAking.
The promise of SOA has been tantalizing for years now. Among other things, SOA is supposed to finally better business with technology. “I see the focus on people and processes — how customers or employees use the technology — becoming more important. And this emphasis is where the real value of Web services will lie,” says Daryl Plummer at Gartner.
So what is unpalatable? It is the journey that promises to be long, bumpy and exhausting. Early SOA pioneers like Guardian Life and Amazon.com are starting to show significant pay back. But their SOA initiatives took them four to five years. SAP has been working on re-architecting its product for the last five years. It estimates that less than half its customer base would have converted to its SOA by 2010.
The tools to get there are hairy. IBM packages 13 (!) WebSphere and Tivoli products as part of its SOA arsenal.
And SOA may need armies of consultants. Consulting magazine reports that “SOA promises to bring back the demand for IT professional services just like the good ’ole days, like client-server computing, like the e-Business frenzy.”
These are grandiose plans when most IT departments have little credibility after large-scale ERP, Y2K and e-biz initiatives.
In the meantime, in the Valley, young (and old) kids, oblivious to all these weighty questions, are writing their own SOAs on weekends. Many SOA vendors and initiatives are starting to use terms like Web 2.0 and SOA 2.0. But they need to change the core issues with SOA implementations. Here are some suggestions:
8 SOA sponsors need to find a line of business executive with a specific project where they can use the technology/concept. Then another, then another. If there are not enough volunteers, give up — at least for a couple of years. It is the classic solution looking for a problem
8 Think of constraints, wherein the project team will have no more than three persons and project time will have no more than three months. The total burdened cost will be less than $100 thousand. And that’s for the pilot! Even less for on-going ones. You are competing with Web 2.0 team sizes and budgets
8 If you are an SOA tools provider, package everything into one “wrapper.” Do not show customers your sausage factory of 10-20 products
8 If you are an applications provider, for every time you mention SOA plans, make sure you have five mentions of application-functionality improvements
8 Web services is about technology and not people services. Send the consultants home.
We need to talk about SOA in dollars and cents and not acronyms like WSDL and UDDI. Give those — and the hype about SOA — a REST.
