The three levels of SOA maturity

Asked to identify where service-oriented architecture falls on Gartner's hype cycle - which identifies stages of technology development from invention to broad acceptance - most IT executives would probably say we're nearing the "peak of inflated expectations." Rhetoric is running high and vendors are scrambling to recast what they do as critical to SOA.

Thomas Erickson, general manager of Systinet, a company that sells what it calls an SOA governance and life-cycle management platform, has a more granular view. He has identified three stages of SOA maturity.

In the first stage companies service-enable their applications using standard APIs. Although the costs are modest, so are the business gains, Erickson says.

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Asked to identify where service-oriented architecture falls on Gartner's hype cycle - which identifies stages of technology development from invention to broad acceptance - most IT executives would probably say we're nearing the "peak of inflated expectations." Rhetoric is running high and vendors are scrambling to recast what they do as critical to SOA.

Thomas Erickson, general manager of Systinet, a company that sells what it calls an SOA governance and life-cycle management platform, has a more granular view. He has identified three stages of SOA maturity.

In the first stage companies service-enable their applications using standard APIs. Although the costs are modest, so are the business gains, Erickson says.

If you want to tie your SAP order-management system to your warehouse system, having service-enabled those systems using a common language will simplify the process, he says. That's the upside. "But someone will still have to go in and manually make the connections," Erickson adds. "It is not really service oriented. The systems will be tightly coupled, so a change in one system might break the other." This is where most customers are today, Erickson says, although some companies are further along than others.

The few companies that have entered the second stage are those that use SOA services to build new or modernize existing applications. Reaching this stage means a company has visibility into who is using which services and a sense of application interdependencies. What's more, in this stage it becomes feasible to reuse services because more thought is put into policies that services must adhere to, such as security and uptime requirements, Erickson says.

One limitation remains, however: There is no automated way to ensure changing a service doesn't break linked components, Erickson says. That comes in the third stage, with the arrival of what he calls dynamic SOA. In this environment a new version of a service would notify consumers about the upgrade, who could then determine if and how they might benefit from the update. If it might cause more harm than good, the consumer could decide to keep the existing service. "It all becomes more dynamic," Erickson says.

This dynamic environment is still a few years off, he says, and depends on the development of more standards to ensure policies are interoperable.

While Systinet's 170 customers today are large companies, Erickson says these big players soon will start using SOA in the supply chain, which will necessitate smaller players coming up to speed.

That type of shift will start to move SOA along the Gartner curve.

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