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The market for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is seeing a huge increase and there is a fundamental commitment to SOA as the future of process and application design, according to a new survey by IBM.

The survey report, done by the Link Group for IBM, which drew more than 4,200 technical and business leaders from around the world, said more than 4,500 IBM customers globally have modeled their businesses around SOA, a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align IT with business goals, helping to result in greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity. Globally SOA is a USD 160 billion industry and rising fast.

The survey found both significant increases in budgets and the number of SOA projects aimed at new business challenges with 40 per cent of respondents indicating that between 10-30 per cent of overall IT budgets are being spent on SOA projects. Additionally, 53 per cent of respondents indicated that their budgets for SOA projects for 2007 increased between 10-20 per cent compared to 2006.

The survey also revealed that 67 per cent of the respondents said the key decision makers responsible for moving to an SOA strategy are business leaders including C-level executives and business managers. Additionally, 65 per cent of clients said that business leaders are also primarily responsible for selecting an IT partner to help achieve business goals in an SOA.

"Business leaders in ASEAN not engaged in the SOA decision making process will soon find themselves at a competitive disadvantage," said Dan Powers, Vice President, Worldwide SOA, IBM. "With its focus on optimizing and automating specific business processes and eliminating redundant ones, it is business leaders that will drive the adoption of SOA from early stages to enterprise wide adoption."

In their survey of 680 Asia Pacific (including Japan) companies, Dr. Patrick Chan, Research Director of Asia-Pacific Emerging Technologies Research at IDC, explained that most IT project managers have positive attitudes and strong understanding of SOA with mid-sized and larger corporates with more budget power. These are likely to adopt SOA in their organisation within the next 1 - 2 years.

As SOA is seeing an upward trend, S&S Media is organising a event from 21-23 November on SOA at Bangalore. SOA India 2007 is the first of its kind business and technical conference on SOA to the Indian Enterprise IT community of CIOs, CTOs, Management, IT directors, IT managers, IT architects, Network and Infrastructure specialists, Project Managers, Project Leaders, and Software Architects. SOA India 2007 will feature two separate, but parallel, tracks for a business and technical audience. Other fringe topics that will be part of the larger discussion include: Business Process Modeling (BPM), Agile best practices, BPEL, SaaS, MDM, BI, and Enterprise 2.0.

For more details visit http://www.sda-india.com/conferences/soaindia/# or www.soaindia2007.com

Shortage of SOA skills
Another interesting finding from the IBM SOA survey was that there is an increasing need for training staff so they possess the unique combination of both business and IT skills required for a business to realise the potential of SOA. Currently, half the respondents said they have less than 25 per cent of the necessary SOA skills to help their company meet long-term goals. However, 80 per cent of respondents are increasing SOA skills in their company this year, with more than 60 per cent focused on retraining existing staff on SOA. A combination of business and IT skills was cited by 68 per cent of the respondents as prerequisite to applying SOA to meet business goals.

To help address the SOA skills shortage, IBM has introduced a new, interactive SOA game as well as announcing certification programs to help organisations develop teams of individuals with so-called "T-shaped" skills, which encompass both deep business skills, represented by the horizontal line of the "T", and technical understanding, represented by the vertical line.

The new SOA game, called Innov8, is an interactive, 3-D educational BPM simulator designed to bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders in an organization. This type of serious gaming – simulations which have the look and feel of a game but correspond to non-game events or processes such as business operations – has emerged as a successful method to retrain or develop new skills. This simulator is a result of the annual IBM SOA case study competition among graduate students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. The game, which is played with a joystick, is based on advanced, commercial gaming technologies and allows players to visualize how an SOA affects different parts of the organisation. Together, users can literally see business processes, identify bottlenecks, and explore 'what if' scenarios before the SOA is deployed.

IBM has enhanced its SOA certification and education programs with new, self-paced and instructor-led courses conducted online and in classrooms. With more than 218 SOA-based courses for every level in an organisation, IBM's SOA curricula provide the roadmap to master the most highly sought-after SOA industry skills.

Here in the ASEAN region, IBM continues to foster relationships with higher education institutions through their Academic Initiative program and have already conducted Technology Briefing sessions in over 12 universities across ASEAN with well- respected institutions such as the National University of Singapore and the Institute of Technology, Bandung Indonesia (ITB). These Technology Briefings have impacted over 1500 students on SOA reuse and connectivity, Architecture, design, building of solutions and life-cycle management using the SOA platform, with the more recent ones being here in Singapore at the Nanyang Polytechnic with 112 students and at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) in Thailand with 172 students . These Technology Briefings are focused on creating greater awareness amongst the students to create SOA based solutions and provided them access to resources, leading to skills certification through the IBM Academic Initiative program.

An addtional finding was that 75 per cent of respondents said the primary reason for implementing SOA was to meet new business goals versus 25 percent that cited fixing existing business problems.

IBM recently made a series of announcements that directly address many of the survey's findings including:

- To help business leaders better understand the various stages of SOA evaluation and deployment, IBM announced plans for eight new industry-specific SOA Roadmaps spanning six industries. Each of the SOA roadmaps contains a business blueprint, which helps customers map the business side of an SOA strategy, and an industry-specific framework, which includes core technology used to execute the business blueprint. The new SOA Roadmaps focus on critical business process areas within a given industry. - Additionally IBM announced six new SOA professional services focused on SOA Diagnostic, SOA Strategy, SOA Implementation Planning, and Business Process Management Enabled by SOA, SOA Design Development and Integration, and SOA Management. New capabilities include infrastructure and strategy workshops for SOA Strategy professional services, web application and portal infrastructure services for SOA Design, Development and Integration and a new testing center of excellence for SOA management.

www.soaindia2007.com


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