Companies’ plans for SOA nose dive for first time

Daniel Sholler, research vice president at Gartner, says that, for the first time, since the beginning of 2008, there has been a dramatic fall in the number of companies planning to adopt SOA – down to 25% from 53% in 2007 – while the number of firms with no plans to adopt SOA more than doubled from 6% last year to 16% now. “Organisations without a clear business case for SOA, and without a plan to develop or acquire the necessary skills, are justified in taking a cautious approach, and delaying SOA adoption plans for the coming year,” he says. “The focus should be on creating shared services and the governance processes necessary for sharing within a reasonable domain.” Sholler suggests that most companies are focusing on SOA in the context of new developments that use Java, Microsoft .Net and some of the dynamic programming languages, such as Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby. “Organisations should think about options when applying SOA in legacy programming environments because skills blending the two will likely be scarce,” he observes. However, underlying all that is the inescapable conclusion that there has been a massive change in the perception of SOA – from something that is essentially inevitable in a short time to a situation where many organisations have evaluated SOA and chosen not to spend time and effort on it. “As more organizations gain experience with the true efforts and costs required to use SOA, and the benefits that they gain from doing it, it creates a sounder basis for making business decisions around whether to pursue it at this time,” comments. Sholler said. “The result of this is that the later adopters have a clearer business choice, and that by taking an inherently cautious stance, it is not surprising that a higher proportion would choose not to pursue SOA.”