Proving SOA Worth Is a Big Challenge for IT

The company, which the executive asked not be identified, plans to go live this fall with SOA management software from AmberPoint Inc. in Oakland, Calif. His company hopes to prove the value of the 100-plus Web services it has in place today.

The company expects that the implementation of Amber-Point's SOA Management System tool, coupled with Tibco Software Inc.'s Staffware Process Suite process management software, will replace previous efforts to manage the firm's SOA using service registries.

The registries were not an effective way to get visibility into the SOA, because only 20% of the services were being registered by the company's 1,500 developers, he said. At the same time, even fewer consumers were logging information about how they would be using the services.

With the AmberPoint system, once a service is discovered and all its associated metadata is added to the warehouse, a workflow is automatically kicked off to retrieve approval for the service and to request that managers build a service-level agreement governing its use.

"When I go to IT management, they don't care how many services are out there," the executive said. "But if we know the value of a service -- which we get people to model once it is discovered -- and we know how many reuse [instances] there are, we can start backing into the value of reuse."

Long-Term Challenge

Finding ways to show the value of an SOA remains perplexing for many corporate IT organizations, according to industry analysts.

A recent research report from Boston-based Aberdeen Group Inc., for example, noted that 41% of respondents surveyed at 284 companies have found that the biggest obstacles to SOA adoption is "limited visibility of SOA value."

Likewise, a recent survey of 400 IT managers by Evans Data Corp. found that justifying an SOA investment is one of the top four inhibitors to SOA adoption.