Stories by: Mike Kavis

Most SOA failures are about people and processes, not technology. To achieve success, learn from these mistakes.

The SOA Consortium and CIO magazine recently announced the winners of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Case Study Competition. All of the winners successfully delivered business or mission value using an SOA approach.

A few weeks ago I wrote how SOA is not just for integrating legacy systems but could also be a strategic approach for launching a brand new startup. I argued that startups can build their products and services from scratch in a true service oriented fashion without the burden of culture change issues, business process reengineering efforts, and changing the way the firm develops. Starting from scratch creates a tremendous opportunity to build it right from the start.

We questioned three individuals to get viewpoints on SOA testing from three different perspectives: trainer, vendor, practitioner. Randy Rice is a leading author, speaker and consultant in the field of software testing and software quality. Randy's company provides training for SOA testing. Frank Cohen is an author and founder of open source testing software company, Push2Test. Jim Giddings is a practitioner and former SOA road warrior who has worked on several SOA initiatives over the past few years.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) creates tremendous opportunities for companies to integrate across departments, across systems and across enterprises. Integration can help simplify business processes, improve speed to market, allow companies to react quicker to changes in the business, and share data and services. For example, SOA architected correctly can allow an e-commerce site to integrate seamlessly with its suppliers, distributors, credit card companies and consumers. After a customer places an order, a flurry of messages is orchestrated by the system without asking for any of the users or systems to login each time.

If your company is considering SOA, there are many issues and challenges that need to be addressed in order to improve the chances for a successful implementation. One issue that is often overlooked early on is an assessment of the company's existing skill sets and the application development culture.

When people talk about SOA, they frequently associate it with large companies with years of disconnected legacy applications. After all, many companies leverage SOA to rejuvenate their legacy systems and improve integration and business processes between systems. But SOA is not just for the big boys and it is not only good for connecting legacy systems. Implementing SOA can also be a strategic approach to launching a brand new startup!

If your company is considering SOA, there are many issues and challenges that need to be addressed in order to improve the chances for a successful implementation. One issue that is often overlooked early on is an assessment of the company's existing skill sets and the application development culture.

Implementing SOA can be an extremely expensive undertaking. You might need to purchase several products within the SOA stack like an enterprise service bus (ESB), a business process modeling (BPM) tool, a portal, a rules engine and a data services tool. But it doesn't stop there. There are additional tools for testing, SOA governance, security... and the list goes on and on. In addition to all the software, you need to budget for training, hardware, consulting and salaries.