WebServices dot org

Searching for the SOA Mega Deal

Service Oriented Architectures, and previously Web services, have been gaining momentum with customers for the past few years. Customers have moved beyond pilot and testing phases and are now using this industry standard approach to transform to on demand businesses that integrate data across the enterprise, as well as externally with customers, partners and suppliers. SOA is clearly an in industry standard approach that will help customers achieve on demand business goals including driving down costs and creating new opportunities for growth.

When most people think of signing a deal with a large services company a few thoughts immediately come to mind: army of consultants, lengthy contract, multi million (or even billion) dollar commitment.

With traditional services companies so heavily involved and invested in helping customers transform to on demand businesses using industry standards in an SOA, the question most top of mind is, "When are the SOA mega deals coming?" And, "When will there be a press release about a customer spending billions of dollars on a multi-year contract for a complete overhaul of their IT infrastructure to create an SOA?"

SOA is leading a titanic shift in how customers approach buying and implementing technology, creating the need for a massive culture change for vendors. This geologic bulldozer will level manymountain-sized IT projects and replace them with small building blocks based on components and reusable assets that can be scaled in a fraction of the time -- and money.

The value of SOA won't be realized through large individual projects typical of standard services engagements, at least not in the very near future. The proverbial SOA "mega deal" isn't likely to happen in the same way standard outsourcing deals are purchased or implemented. Instead, customers are focused on smaller engagements - months or even weeks in length -- that address specific business problems such as helping insurance companies streamlining claims processing, telecoms produce a single customer bill and retailers keep store shelves optimally stocked. Successful smaller engagements that solve the identified business problem will lead to multiple consecutive engagements with the same customers.

Customers understand and prefer this method of purchasing technology and services. Identify a specific business problem, determine an approach to solve it, realize ROI and then move on to the next business problems. This approach is forcing the strategy shift away from customers simply purchasing middleware, a database, management tools or even general services from a single vendor. Customers are demanding solutions based on IT components with the right combination of technology and services tosolve specific business problems.Vendors that can't adapt to this new culture will have problems.They must re-engineer themselves to sell large quantities of components and assets that fit into a defined ecosystem -based on standards - and scale these components to address additional business problems.

A complete SOA solution won't be delivered by a single vendor. Existing IT infrastructures are too complex and contain too many different technologies for any single vendor to credibly claim that products on the back of their truck will meet every need and fix every problem a customer has. Vendors will need to partner or they won't survive this cultural shift. Customers will lead with a trusted partner to walk them through this transformation and one that will successfully partner with multiple vendors to create the technology components customers need.

This process will be free of "mega deals" and focus more on multiplecontracts that address specific business problems.