SOA adoption eats up 40 per cent of IT resources

The high costs of migrating to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can eat up 40 per cent of an organisation's IT budget, according to a new report by the Aberdeen Group.

SOA is essentially a web services-based IT infrastructure based around business processes and services instead of siloed, standalone applications.

The Aberdeen Group benchmark report Enterprise Service Bus and SOA Middleware surveyed more than 120 IT and business professionals and found that 90 per cent are adopting or have already adopted SOA technologies.

Peter S Kastner, VP and research director for enterprise integration at Aberdeen Group, said there is growing and widespread acceptance of SOA technology, especially in large enterprises with more than $1bn in annual revenues.

He said in the report: "SOA is broadly seen as a real technology step forward, with the largest companies - who have the biggest integration problems - leading the way."

But while the rewards are high for those who successfully migrate to SOA there is also a high price.

Kastner said: "Redesigning business processes, high IT integration costs, and customisation challenges are eating up 40 per cent of the IT budget in integration expenditures."

The benchmarking report says companies are taking three distinct approaches to SOA adoption. According to Aberdeen Group these are:

• SOA 'light': This approach is based on open source programs and industry standards and is best suited to small companies, lightweight integration and simple web services such as employee self-service.

• Enterprise SOA: This is a suite of SOA middleware for mission-critical and complex installations, best suited to mid-to-large companies.

• SOA ERP: This approach offers mid-size and some large companies an entry to SOA via extensions to enterprise resource planning application software.