Dawn of SOBA? Data-rich, service- oriented business apps are outgrowth of SOA movement

At a recent IT seminar attended by programmers, a presentation on applications inspired by services-oriented-architecture was given by Jason Bloomberg, who spoke of the emerging method’s likely downstream effects on programming, architectural development, and other under-the-cover issues. Bloomberg, a senior analyst with New York-based Zapthink, an advisory group focused on services and Web 2.0, sees all SOA-related development as offering big possibilities for operational efficiencies and code renewal.

One term coming out of the whole movement, from Gartner, is “service oriented business applications,” or SOBA. Zapthink co-opted Gartner’s term and tweaked the definition, noting that SOBA is a composite application that incorporates standardized services to implement a business process.

Further, says Zapthink, enterprise mashups–a natural development over time–can reduce the need for a lot of traditional programming. This is shown in the Venn Diagram on page 37.

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ZapThink: Enterprises Not Buying Service-Oriented Architecture by Name; Consulting Firms Integrate SOA Best Practices with Business-Focused Offerings

BALTIMORE, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sept. 6, 2006–ZapThink released a report today showing that few enterprises are specifically budgeting for or requesting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by name. Instead, business buyers budget for specific solutions to their business problems, and more consulting firms than ever before leverage Service Orientation best practices to provide those solutions. The main buyer of such initiatives has shifted toward the non-technical, business part of the enterprise.

“The clear pattern with today’s SOA projects is that they are increasingly business-focused,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. “Many consulting firms are integrating SOA best practices into a broad differentiated offering that is not necessarily specific to SOA.”

ZapThink expects the percentage of IT projects overall that leverage Service Orientation best practices to continue to grow over time, and those best practices will soon become ubiquitous. ZapThink also expects the percentage of IT projects that are named, SOA-specific projects to peak in 2007, with Service Orientation best practices increasingly subsumed within the expected, routine part of IT projects more broadly after that date.

Key findings of the report include:

• Breaking up a large SOA initiative into multiple, discrete projects is an effective way to manage the risk of architectural change.
• Integration-centric offerings and technologies are taking a back seat to organizations’ need to improve their overall approach to enterprise architecture.
• Many SOA consulting providers are confused by product vendors who often distort the true message of SOA to best fit their product offerings.
• Many SOA consulting firms confuse architecture with implementation, causing significant issues in short-term SOA adoption.
• Average deal sizes for SOA projects range from an average of $150,000 for integration-focused efforts to several million dollars for enterprisewide and compliance-focused initiatives.

The report, available on ZapThink’s Web site at www.zapthink.com, features several firms offering SOA consulting services, including Accenture (NYSE: ACN – News), AgilePath, Alphacourt, Anexinet, Arc Aspicio, Avanade, BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS – News), BearingPoint (NYSE: BE – News), Bouvet, CapGemini (Paris), CherryRoad Technologies, City Practitioners, D. Callingham & Assoc., Daugherty Business Solutions, Definition 6, e-Brilliance, eSigma, gen-i, Geniant, Hitachi Consulting (NYSE: HIT – News), HP (NYSE: HPQ – News), IBM Global Services (NYSE: IBM – News), Infosys (NASDAQ: INFY – News), innoQ, IPT, Kanbay (NASDAQ: KBAY – News), Keane (NYSE: KEA – News), Lydian Technology, MITRE, Modhelus, Momentum SI, MphasiS, MW2 Consulting, Network Effects, Online Business Systems, PricewaterhouseCoopers, ProSolveIT, Satyam (NYSE: SAY – News), Schumacher Partners, Semantic Arts, SentientPoint, SilverTrain, SOA Software, SOA Systems, Software AG (Frankfurt), SRL Group, Statera, Summa Technologies, Synergy International, Systemiclogic, TasmanAve, TeamSOA, Tier1 Innovation, Voyant Group, Wipro (NYSE: WIT – News), WM-Data (Stockholm), and XWebServices. The report also mentions the following vendors: AmberPoint, Composite Software, Fiorano, Forum Systems, Infravio, LogicLibrary, Mercury (OTC: MERQ – News), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT – News), Mindreef, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL – News), Reactivity, RedHat (NASDAQ: RHAT – News), SAP (NYSE: SAP – News), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW – News), WSO2, and WebLayers.

Read more at: ZapThink Press Release

SOA Consulting: Current Market Trends

As the practice of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) matures, professional services firms that offer SOA-related services continue to lead the market in the creation and application of best practices for SOA. For this report, ZapThink surveyed 58 consulting firms who identified themselves as offering SOA consulting services in order to assemble a detailed, global picture of the state of the market for SOA consulting worldwide. ZapThink found a substantial maturation of SOA consulting offerings across the board, with an increased focus on the business value that SOA can provide. While there still remains some confusion over the nature and applicability of SOA, methodologies, engagements, and understanding of the SOA value proposition have all dramatically improved in the last few years to the point that SOA best practices are increasingly being taken for granted as the standard approaches for solving a broad range of business problems in organizations around the world.

Hyderabad-based software firm announces expansion plans

“Up to this point in time, most companies’ SOA investments have focused on the underlying infrastructure — middleware, management, security, development tools. But there has been little in the way of products that service-enable existing applications,” said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at Zapthink.

“As the SOA market matures, however, there is an urgent need for technologies and approaches that can help companies leverage legacy applications in the SOA environment. SEEC’s technology provides the automation capabilities companies need to efficiently adapt and modernize legacy applications for the future,” he added.

Read more at: NewKerala.com

SEEC Expands Relationships with Leading IT Services Firms

“Up to this point in time, most companies’ SOA investments have focused on the underlying infrastructure — middleware, management, security, development tools. But there has been little in the way of products that service-enable existing applications,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at Zapthink. “As the SOA market matures, however, there is an urgent need for technologies and approaches that can help companies leverage legacy applications in the SOA environment. SEEC’s technology provides the automation capabilities companies need to efficiently adapt and modernize legacy applications for the future.

Read more at: SEEC Press Release

Web Services Spread Slowly Into IT

Using Web services for point-to-point integration is a baby step toward building a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that can manage Web services, said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. SOAs support the security, business process management and performance monitoring needed to use Web services to quickly build new applications by tying together components of existing ones.

“An SOA is more of a challenge because it involves architectural change,” said Bloomberg. “The goal is an architecture that is flexible enough so the business side can rework business applications over time.”

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Accenture: SOA as Strategic Architecture for Improving Business Performance

Professional services firm Accenture’s core mission is to improve the business performance of its clients. Accenture accomplishes this mission through a combination of business process expertise and technical consulting. Accenture’s technology roadmap offers their clients an approach to building information technology solutions and approaches that will meet the goal of business performance improvement.

Accenture believes that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will underpin this technology roadmap. They believe SOA will be the single dominant technical architecture in the future, driven primarily by the need for interoperability. As a result, they are recommending and implementing SOA-based approaches for improving the business of clients worldwide.

Slowly Weaving Web Services Together

ZapThink, a Waltham (Mass.) consultancy that tracks the Web-services market, estimates that spending on the technology was $1.8 billion in 2002 and should exceed $5 billion next year. Those estimates are imprecise, given the blurry definition of Web services.

Read more at: BusinessWeek Online

Web services to offload integration from professional services

As service-oriented architectures utilizing Web services become dominant, companies will increasingly be using professional services organizations less for system integration and more for architectural consulting and business process automation, according to a report from research firm ZapThink announced this week.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Service-Oriented Architecture Consulting for Professional Services Organizations

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) represent an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that promises a flexible IT environment that leads to business agility. As companies look to leverage the business advantages of Web Services to address strategic business needs, they are increasingly looking to build SOAs. However, SOAs require special skills and expertise. When companies do not have such skills in-house, they turn to consultants, system integrators, and other professional services organizations.

The movement to SOAs present both opportunities and threats to consulting firms: on the one hand, there will be an increased demand for architectural consulting, business process consulting and the implementation tasks associated with building SOAs. On the other hand, as SOAs take hold and Service-oriented process solutions supplant integration solutions, the market for system integration will dry up, requiring system integrators to change their business focus.

This report analyzes the market for SO