Why CIOs Are Increasingly Adopting SOA

Apparently the number of CIOs adopting SOA seems to be going down. Are CIOs losing interest in SOA?

Carter: Actually, the story is a little different than what it seems. CIOs are becoming more business focused. The most insightful thing I heard substantiated this, was at a roundtable of CIOs held quite recently. As they were introducing themselves, one of them said, "Hi, I am an investment banker who focuses on IT." I think we would see more of that where CIOs are focused on the business. This means they are concentrating on whatever their challenges are and initiating a service-oriented solution to mitigate the challenge. Here, interestingly they would not say that they have embarked upon an SOA project.

Did the economic slowdown slow the adoption of SOA down?

Carter: We are actually seeing quite the opposite. We are seeing compelling reasons for people who want to adapt to change. If you define SOA as an enabler of process change, we are seeing its adoption accelerating. We are seeing the size of deals getting smaller as the model of adopting SOA is changing. But, the number of customers is growing. I would say that slowdown is causing customers to initiate more pilot or industry-specific projects rather than large, full-fledged projects.

SMBs usually wonder whether they are complex enough to adopt SOA. How can they easily get on the SOA platform and how can they handle lack of availability of skillsets?

Carter: We can help in this. By the end of June, our BPM Blueworks would be available, which is like conducting BPM in the cloud. SMBs might want to know what would happen if we change a specific process and how to go about changing it actually. With BPM Blueworks, you don't have to buy or configure any software as you can straightaway model your BPM on the cloud. Processes, drawn on a Powerpoint slide or Visio file, can be imported in the BPM Blueworks and can simulate it. You can change the process and can figure out how will the change affect your returns on investment. You could also bring in an analyst or a University professor and collaborate with them on the process in the cloud, and export it out to be used in the business. It is a great way to get started.

We have also put a lot of our products on Amazon's cloud, EC2 to help SMBs get started on SOA. For example, our product WebSphere Smash helps you to create a widget and mash it up with an associated service in the cloud. You can test for free but if you are putting it in production, you pay. We have about 80 partners globally using WebSphere Smash on Amazon EC2. One partner in Brazil has used Smash to create a mash-up, which is a composite application for gas stations. These gas stations can go up on the cloud, where the solution provider has hosted its application as a service. It is yet another great way to get SMBs started.

The last way is our SOA Sandbox. This is a whole set of scenarios teaching you how to develop your skills on SOA. It offers scenarios such as supply chain, stocking decisions, traffic management etc and lets you play with the products for about 30 days. You can save your work and export it when you want to use it in real world.

So, how do you see CIOs prioritizing SOA at present?

Carter: According to a recent global study of Gartner, the number one priority for CEOs today is process improvement. CIOs on the other hand had SOA as number two on their priority list. Security happens to be the number one, as always. In fact, recently I attended a conference on SOA at Tokyo, and there we saw the attendance at the SOA conference doubling this year. And, among the attendees, there were four times more number of CIOs than last year in Tokyo. The Gartner Conference on BPM at London, held recently, was the only conference that had increased attendance this year. This easily shows a substantial increase in interest for SOA.