Research Report on SOA - What you need to know?
Posted by Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK at Saturday, September 23, 2006 7:19 PM and is filed under Research Report 
http://software.silicon.com/webservices/0,39024657,39162664,00.htm
Quocirca's Straight Talking: SOA - huh?
Most businesses don't know what it is - but they should
"Just how aware are businesses of Service Oriented Architectures, and how much benefit do people see from being able to have such an environment? Quocirca's research points to high levels of ignorance in many areas - a great deal of education is needed to drive forwards SOA's capabilities for general adoption. However, the research also shows that those companies that have gone down the SOA route are gaining real, tangible benefits.
Key Findings
- SOA awareness is far lower than expected
From earlier research, overall growth in SOA awareness has been minimal. The lack of business awareness of SOA is stark, with over 50% of business respondents being completely unaware of SOA. Even within the technical community, this lack of awareness is running at nearly 25%.
- Regional differences in SOA awareness are high
The US leads in SOA awareness with a response rate of 37% for a deep knowledge of SOA; Europe comes in second at 27% and APAC trails at 15%. However, country-level granularity shows some large holes in awareness - Eastern Europe has 65% of respondents with no understanding of SOA, with Greater China and Korea running at greater than 25% levels of no understanding.
- Those who have implemented an SOA see great benefits in its use
Nearly 90% of those who have implemented an SOA see the approach as being "highly important" or "critical" to their business. This compares to 28% for the total respondent group.
- Life Sciences and Consumer Packaged Goods lead the way in SOA deployments
Nearly 20% of Life Sciences companies have a fully implemented SOA architecture. At the other end of the scale, less than 5% of industrial and retail companies have an SOA infrastructure.
- Telecommunications sees the greatest importance in SOA
17% of telecommunication companies see SOA as critical to their success going forwards, whereas just over 1% of financial institutions see SOA as being critical.
- Security and systems management are not seen as insuperable problems
Although nearly 30% of respondents saw security as being very hard or impossible in an SOA environment, 60% saw that SOA security would be little different to other security needs. Similarly, although nearly 10% of respondents perceived the management of an SOA to be too difficult to contemplate, nearly 50% saw that existing systems would be able to cope, and over 30% felt that it would be done easily enough with new tooling. SOA Gurus had found security and management far easier than the overall perceptions
- Many companies accept that functional re-use is the way forwards
But not all companies are using SOA and Web Service standards to make this happen. With the lack of awareness of SOA the research shows, companies run the risk of repeating historical mistakes in implementing an architecture that gains short-term tactical gains, while requiring a "rip and replace" upgrade in the future."
Quocirca's research report on SOA is available for free download via their website.
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Gary E. Smith
SOA Enterprise Architect
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