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.

SEC launches financial reporting XML project

Toolsets aside, the biggest challenge to XBRL adoption is not necessarily the technology behind the specification, but the politics. Getting all parties involved to define and agree upon common taxonomies that encompass different national and international accounting regulations is tough, says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink.

“The big challenge with XBRL is getting all these different jurisdictions and accounting bodies to agree on the same terms for financial reporting information,” he says. “That’s something that’s never really been done before, and it’s a big task.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld

Web Services Distributed Management spec approved

An analyst said WSDM would provide for standardization at a time when the market for Web services management is consolidating.

“We’re seeing the ‘big boys’ enter with significant products to market, including IBM, HP, and CA,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. “As a result, the big initiative is to standardize how these various products can manage the Web services that are running on other people’s platforms, especially on IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun.

“As such, WSDM goes a long way to solve two problems: the use of Web services to manage systems and the ability to manage Web services themselves. What we should expect to see is more consolidation of vendors and products in this space and some agreement on WSDM as the format for solving heterogeneous Web services management issues,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Intel Joins Open-Source Tools Consortium

“Intel’s primary focus is to drive the market for their chips, and they don’t really care whose brand of software is running on them,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass.-based market research firm. “I doubt that Intel’s participation in Eclipse will cause any problems to the Wintel duopoly–after all, Eclipse software runs on Windows. As companies move up the layers of abstraction to Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures, it becomes less important what operating systems or hardware platforms are under the covers, so Intel is simply trying to cover their bets so that their chips are found in as many places as possible.”

Read more at: eWeek

Companies Team on Web Services Transaction Spec

The trinity of specs share some things in common with previously announced specs such as ebXML (define) and certainly rubs shoulders with the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction schemas from Microsoft, IBM and others. How are they different?

ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer said WS-CAF is focused on the B2B-oriented transactions, which is a more focused and specific problem than the more general reliable, transacted processes solved by the WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination specs.

Schmelzer and his colleague, ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg, called this issue another case of vendors chopping up a particular problem into small pieces.

“In essence, this is a “divide-and-conquer” strategy,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “By dividing up a much larger, more significant problem area into more minute problem areas, these vendors (that are struggling to become Web Services leaders) are hoping to sway users into particular implementations that use their specs, which of course, IBM and Microsoft will simply not support.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Rivalry bogs down Web services

With the software industry betting on Web services standards as the basis for many software systems, customers can expect a continuation of the high-stakes politics and battles among computing providers, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at research firm ZapThink.
“There’s going to be a lot more of this (conflict) as problems get more complex,” Schmelzer said. “As specifications take on more complicated issues like security, business process (automation) and service levels, they become competitive differentiation for products.”

Read more at: CNet

Case Study: e2Open

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Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

Microsoft Bares CE Source to OEMs

“Microsoft is definitely making a push to “open” their technologies,” said Ronald Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst of research firm ZapThink. “It’s not clear how far this will go, but there are indications that various different market sectors are demanding that Microsoft open up their technologies so that buyers won’t feel locked in to the Microsoft solution. In particular, the US government is one of those forces demanding those changes — and not from a Department of Justice perspective, but rather as a customer of Microsoft’s.”

Read more at: Internetnews