SOA discussion moves away from IT staffers
ConvergenceAsia Staff
24/07/2007

According to a survey conducted by IBM, the strategic decisions to adopt a service oriented architecture (SOA) are shifting away from the realm of IT staffers to business executives.

SOA is a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align it with business goals, driving efficiencies, cost savings, productivity, and enabling the creation of more modular and global business designs.

Conducted for IBM by the Link Group and consisted of a sampling of clients at the IBM Impact 2007 event, which drew more than 4,200 technical and business leaders, the survey validates a fundamental commitment to SOA as the future of process and application design.

At the same time, the survey also found 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.

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.

Additional findings include:

SOA skills
There is a shortage of required SOA skills in the marketplace today according to the respondents. 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.

SOA budgets
Companies are allocating a substantial portion of their IT budgets to SOA projects. This year 40 per cent of respondents indicated that between 10 and 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 and 20 per cent compared to 2006.

Reasons for using SOA
To help clients keep up with the rapidly changing and competitive market, 75 per cent of the respondents said the primary reason for implementing SOA is to meet new business goals, versus 25 per cent that cited fixing existing business problems.

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