Dennis Howlett keeps telling me there are plenty of SOA success stories - customers are just shy about talking about them. Love to see them, because most I find fall in to 2 categories:
a) Large, mega implementations. Infoworld has a nice article this week on Wachovia's SOA adoption path. But like amazon.com, and Guardian Life the time scales and economics are not for the faint. Wachovia's been at it 20 months so far. To "get the ball rolling" they recruited 265 technologists. $ 100 million + a year investment. I am sure the payback is impressive but few IT groups have shown ability to control such large projects well or get funding approved for such mega projects.
b) Customers with less custom apps who are waiting for their backbone apps vendor to deliver their SOA. And that re-architecting has been mega projects for their vendors and will be mega migrations for their customers. Oracle promises Fusion applications starting in 2008 but little information on migration effort. SAP has been rolling out ESA for several years and does not expect even half its customers to have migrated in the next 5 years. Lawson leveraged IBM WebSphere tools and has managed to spring a short lead over other apps competitors.
I had a nice conversation last week with Don Rippert, CTO of Accenture and I have invited him to write a guest column on what he says they recommend to clients - a phased approach to SOA adoption.
As they say - how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time...
