Systems/Enterprise:

KEY ENTERPRISE BUYERS READYING LARGE INVESTMENTS IN SOAs

According to the "Yankee Group 2004 U.S. Enterprise Web Service Survey," a study of 437 enterprises across the United States, senior enterprise buyers within manufacturing, financial services, health care and wireless sectors are preparing to invest in service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure development. The related Yankee Group report, "The Tipping Point: Service-Oriented Architectures Are Shifting the Integration Paradigm to a Loosely Coupled Enterprise Framework," shows that the government sector leads the way with current deployments -- two-thirds of this sector have already laid the SOA groundwork.

"The incorporation of new XML-based process-modeling techniques, leveraging the efficiencies delivered by composite applications and Web services, is placing business process logic at the core of application development and dynamic architecture design," says Phil Fersht, Yankee Group Business Applications Group director. "Numerous software companies (including BEA, SAP, Vitria, IBM, Oracle, TIBCO and SeeBeyond) have rapidly been developing integration platforms that respond to the needs of the business process in clearly defined code structures, enabling greater reuse of existing code and the creation of composite applications."

"There is still a large upfront cost implication to design and build architectures based on this model," continued Fersht. "All of these vendors are focusing their attention on developing more loosely coupled solutions and enabling the management of services within the organization."