Despite considerable hype, only a minority of enterprises have adopted service-oriented architectures and most that are using SOA do so only within specific departments or projects, rather than throughout a company, Saugatuck Technology says in a new research alert.

SOA, a way of connecting applications across a network via a common communications protocol, can enable enterprises to reuse software and create flexible business processes. But high up-front costs and confusion about what SOA actually is have led to concerns among businesses considering this approach to building IT systems.

Forrester Research analyst Larry Fulton says one of the most common questions people ask him is whether SOA is real or whether it is hype.

“While there are a few outstanding examples of enterprise SOA deployment -- the fact that they are outstanding indicates how few examples there are,” Saugatuck, a research and consulting firm, said last week in its research update.

Thirty-seven percent of senior IT executives interviewed by Saugatuck last year said they are deploying SOA, at least on a limited basis. However, Saugatuck found that many of those users were only managing a collection of Web services and had not committed to SOA as a management discipline rather than as an integration technology.

Because SOA is a way to build the underlying structure of an IT organization, it should be deployed enterprise-wide and have governance to define roles, responsibilities and processes, says Saugatuck vice president Michael West.

“You can’t just have pockets of SOA, that doesn’t get you what you’re going for,” West says. “It’s kind of an all-in or nothing activity.”

Saugatuck predicts that between 45% and 67% of users will have a limited or full SOA production environment by 2008. Major vendors such as IBM, SAP and Salesforce.com are stressing SOA in new product releases, but a number of factors are holding user companies back, Saugatuck wrote last week.

SOA must “contend with the traditional silo’d structure of IT and business,” the research and consulting firm states. “It requires a strong IT organization and leadership to coordinate SOA planning and execution across these silos -- especially to secure and coordinate funding for shared services.”

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